Ur doin it rong. You're supposed to set up the joke _before_ stopping your post in the middle of a sentence.
For example:
I don't care if they update the UI, as long as they also fix all the memory bloat and the crash problem that keeps happening whenever i tr[NO CARRIER].
Ahhh, so instead of an actual study you want me to go find an episode of a show that is intended at least partially for entertainment, produced by people who from past indications seem to be pro-big business libertarians with an axe to grind on certain subjects.
Since i have neither the time nor the inclination to do so, i checked wikipedia instead. It claims:
In looking at possible increased risk to safety from organic food consumption, reviews have found that although there are theoretical increased risk from microbiological contamination due to increased manure use as fertilizer from organisms like E. coli O157:H7 during organic produce production, there does not exist sufficient evidence of actual incidence of outbreaks that can be clearly tied to organic food production to draw any firm conclusions.[2][3] Other possible sources of increased safety risk from organic food consumption like use of biological pesticides or the theoretical risk from mycotoxins from fungi grown on products due to the lack of effective organic compliant fungicides have likewise not been confirmed by rigorous studies in the scientific literature.[2][4]
So there's no evidence so far that it's more harmful. Sure they grow the stuff in shit, but that's pretty easy to clean off. Chemical pesticides and fertilizers seem to be a bit harder to eliminate completely once you've introduced them to the system. ("Natural" doesn't necessarily mean "healthier", but in a case like this it does mean it's a known quantity that we've had a few tens of thousands of years of experience dealing with.) And duh, no one ever claimed it was as efficient when measured solely on a yield per acre basis. So your claims seem to be one half unsubstantiated and one half straw man.
And as for the claim about taste by the grandparent poster, the next section on wikipedia seems to indicate that there's no evidence that "organic" food tastes any worse than industrial food. (Though i'm quite willing to believe that it doesn't taste particularly better in general either, but that's not the point from my perspective.)
I hate to be that guy, but... citation please? I'm not saying it's impossible, but industrial farming sure uses a lot of chemicals which have been known in the past to cause environmental damage. And my own experience as a kid when my family had a small garden and every report i've heard from anyone who has successfully tried growing their own food (ie using the same methods that "organic" farming is supposed to recreate) indicates that higher quality food is produced that way.
Well, unless he's trying to be punny. Migratory planets were proposed by Immanuel Velikovsky in, among other things, his 1950 book "Worlds in Collision". His ideas were picked up by James P Hogan for his "Giants" series and other books. (James P Hogan was notable for adapting crazy theories into interesting books in his early years, but then digressing later in life to the point where he never met a conspiracy theory he didn't like.)
Well it's at least half true. A couple years ago i just filled out my taxes the usual way, just copying numbers over from my W2 form into the appropriate boxes in the EZ whatever form. (I'm pretty sure i'd already started using FreeTaxUSA by that point, a service which seems perfectly adequate for the basic job, if not spectacular.)
As expected when i was done i found that i would be getting a moderate refund. (I try to set up my deductions to make sure that happens, the amount of interest i'm theoretically losing is pretty tiny, and the extra pain i'd have to go through if i found i owed more just isn't worth it.) So i hit "send" and promptly forgot about it. Then a couple weeks later i got a letter from the IRS telling me they'd corrected my taxes. Needless to say i was rather freaked out when i started reading the letter... until i got to the part where my new refund was about one or two hundred dollars _larger_ than what i'd come up with on my own. (And no, it wasn't a nice round number like the special "rebates" they keep giving us.) I don't know if i screwed up the math somewhere or just missed a really obvious deduction, but whatever it was the IRS caught it and decided i should get more money.
I have no idea how dependable that is, and i certainly don't expect them to catch all the deductions possible for people with a more complicated tax situation, but it seems if the IRS notices a problem they will correct it, no matter whose favor that mistake is in.
Isn't that answer a little simplistic? First, do those liners actually reflect the photons? Or do they absorb them?
Second, if you've got a relatively flat layer across the top of your face/head, then the only particles that could be bounced off the sheet are the ones that bounced back from your jaw at somewhere between a 180 and 225 degree angle (speaking very approximately.) I have no idea what the scatter pattern is like, but that would obviously only be a fraction of the photons that actually get reflected. The fact that they bother putting a lead apron on your body seems to indicate they feel there's some reasonable amount of imperfectly focused particles you should be expecting from your front, and i would expect that amount to be higher closer to where the beam is actually supposed to be focused.
They give you this big heavy blanket (lined with lead? I dunno) to lay across your body when they do the x-ray. They seem to think it's important to block off the areas they're not actually imaging. So why don't they give you something similar to lay across the top half of your face and head? Obviously it wouldn't stop everything, but you'd think it would help at least a little.
Agreed. When my old car got totaled a couple years ago i priced several different types of used cars, including the Prius. Since i was comparing used cars the price differential was lower, and since i live in California i expected to be paying higher than average for gas. I've forgotten exactly how the math worked out, but i found that the Prius would pay for itself in a reasonable amount of time (i think about 5-6 years.)
A little over two years later and i'm still quite happy with my purchase. Even more immediate than the gas savings though is the fact that i only have to stop to refuel about once every other week. It's also impressive how quiet it can be. And although it's certainly not worth the price of admission by itself, all the electronic charts on the dash panel relating to charging and mileage are kind of fun.
I'd certainly get another hybrid (used of course) if i was in the market now, but i'm not, because i've already got a hybrid i'm quite happy with. If this care gets totaled or when i've driven it into the ground then i'll be in the market for another hybrid, unless of course something even better like fuel cell cars have come along by that point.
So if we're not spending _all_ our free time and money trying to correct the injustices of the world, then we're "not doing anything"? It's not good enough to spend some time doing important things and some time having fun?
So as long as there are any problems in the world (and by the way, there will always be problems in the world) no one should ever have any fun. All effort should be devoted to righting wrongs and correcting injustices. No time to spend with loved ones. No time to create or enjoy art. No time to do any science unless that science is entirely directed at solving some existing crisis somewhere. We should all just be mindless cogs in the great machine, working in the sweatshop of freedom.
So wait, why is it that we want to do this? What's the point of even being alive if all you do is eat and sleep and work? Who would want to fight for the "freedom" to do nothing but fight for freedom the entire rest of your life?
Why would i have cared if the pictures showed any of the casualties? As i already stated, my objection was to the adjective used to describe pictures of a disaster (albeit a very small scale disaster) not the existence or sharing of the pictures themselves.
No, i'm saying if it were a joke it would be funny, but it definitely wasn't a joke. I've already pointed out in a previous response some comments where people _did_ make jokes and they _are_ funny, but the simple statement "there are shiny pictures" is not a joke.
You see, normally i agree with you when someone complains about other people on Slashdot making light of death. But see this? That's funny. so is this. And i'm sure there will be more funny posts later. Humor is an important part of dealing with tragedy.
However "Oooohhh! People have been hurt! And there are shiny pictures of it! Wanna see?!?" isn't being sensitive and it isn't funny either.
Both pilots and multiple civilians have been transported to a hospital.
Gizmodo has lots of shiny pictures and more detail.
Really Slashdot/Unknown Lamer? I've got a morbid sense of humor at times, and i'm not even saying i'm not interested in the pictures, but "lots of people are injured and some of them may die" and we've got "lots of shiny pictures" about it! seems a bit callous to me. I mean if it were actually part of some morbid joke it'd be fine, but it's not even a joke, it's just being totally insensitive for no good reason.
Seriously? You're either a troll or some kind of mental freak. I'm someone who's very bad with names. I often have to get introduced to someone three or four times before their name starts to stick. But even so i have learned probably well over a thousand names for well over a hundred different people. First names, last names, occasionally middle names, nicknames, email names, LJ names, twitter names, etc. I currently have exactly two phone numbers memorized. My current phone number, and the phone number of my parents, and i only have the second one memorized because it's the same one i grew up with.
There are hundreds of millions of people who need some kind of phonebook to keep track of phone numbers because the human brain, at least as it's used by the average person, is not used to remembering long strings of numbers that way. Very few of those people need to make lists to keep track of the names of their friends and immediate family. Your response makes absolutely no sense.
WP7's niche is that it totally integrates your contacts. If you know the same person in twitter, linkedin, your email db, facebook and more, WP7 seamlessly integrates them into the one person they are. That's it's killer app. The problem is that it takes more than a one-day test to really see this benefit so reviews are never going to "get it"."
I'm trying to figure out what the advantage of this is. I already have a tool that integrates multiple modes of communication into one one view of a person, it's called my brain. I know that the joe375@hotmail that i email with is the same WittyNickname that i have on my twitter feed and the same as the OlderNickname that i have in my LJ friends. How does Microsoft "seamlessly integrating" them make things better?
Although perhaps the fact that i have two distinct twitter accounts and two LJ accounts and three G+ accounts, all of which get variously used depending on how public i want to be and who i'm trying to communicate with, and know several other people who handle things the same way means that i'm not really the target audience.
Re:When will the Damn Real Name Meme Die?
on
The Phantoms of Google+
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· Score: 4, Informative
I've also been on G+ since it got started, and although i have managed to slip under the radar, several friends and people i know got nailed by the real name policy. Their algorithm for detecting "fake" names is crap, but the shit you have to deal with if you get targeted is real.
And believe it or not, the games that are really cheap on GOG now were _not_ cheap when they first came out in the 90s. Of course like now you could save quite a lot if you were willing to wait and get them used (or just decided to pirate them,) but the people who bought them new were paying a lot of money. I believe PC games went for around $30-$40 then, which accounting for inflation was about $50-$60 now. I believe NES and SNES games were often around $50 and occasionally got as high as $70 (*cough* FF3/6) which is a pretty insane amount in today's dollars.
Yes there were shareware games you could download and sorta free door games on BBSes, but i think you're fooling yourself if you believe that those were mainstream in the same way that Steam is now. (And i'd be quite willing to believe that even Steam isn't mainstream compared to the number of people downloading $1 games on their smartphones and tablets or playing "free" games on Facebook or elsewhere online.)
I'm going to elaborate on what Kjella already said. I don't disagree with you on the idea that the casual gamers are here to stay and they seriously outnumber the hardcore games, i just disagree with the implication (based on the quote you're replying to) that it means Nintendo has nothing to worry about.
The Wii came out in 2006, and the world was a very different place then. The iPhone didn't exist, GOG didn't exist, even Steam had just started making third-party games available. There was no cheap and easy way to buy good games. If you played games you either had a comsole and bought $50 console games, you had a fairly up to date PC and bought $50 PC games, or you had an OK PC and played things like Bejeweled on the web. (Yes, there were people who pirated games and people who played emulator games and people who bought used games, but you get the general idea.)
In that context the Wii attracted a ton of casual gamers. People who'd either never gamed before or just played Bejeweled and such in their browser. It also attracted a decent number of "hardcore" gamers. Some of us thought that Wii Sports was pretty cool, and we believed, or at least hoped, that there would also be hardcore games for the system. It seemed new and creative.
And for awhile everything was good, the casual gamers got Wii Sports and Wii Play and Wii Sports and various dance games and various other casual games. Meanwhile the hardcore players got Twilight Princess and Mario Galaxy and Mario Kart Wii (which kind of hit it off with the casual crowd too i think.)
Fast-forward a little bit and you see the emergence of the dilema that Nintendo is in now. The iPhone came out and took off, and pretty soon $1 games were the norm. Shortly after that Andorid phones took off as well, and though one could argue about the relative depth of the two libraries, it too has a huge library of really cheap games. Meanwhile the indie gaming scene took off, and between PSN, XBox Live and Steam hardcore gamers can get good and creative games For anywhere from $10 or $15 to as low as $1-3 during some of Steam's bigger sales. Steam in particular has turned gaming on the PC from a hobby for those who update their graphics card every year to an almost console like experience. Then on top of that the iPad and Android tablets started coming out, and those $1 games we were playing on phones are suddenly much easier to see and control
So now Nintendo has mostly pissed away the loyalty of the hardcore gamers. They finally changed their stance on Xenoblade and the Last Story (kinda) but not before really mishandling their initial response to Operation Rainfall. At the same time sales of the Wii and Wii games have been plumeting. The fall in hardware sales is kind of expected, and one can argue about the reason for the software slump, but it is certainly arguable that the people who used to be buying Wii software, even if only occasionally, have gotten distracted by the cheaper and more convenient portable gaming options.
If those trends hold true then Nintendo may end up being in a very dangerous middle ground between the hardcore and the casual. Their revelation of the WiiU at E3 last year seems to reflect both the problem and their awareness of the problem. They showed off a console that looked like a half-baked combination of a Wii and an iPad, while promising that it would allow for hardcore games with high quality graphics like you see on the PS3 and 360.
Don't get me wrong, even after their misteps the past two generations i'm still a Nintendo fan, but at the moment the only thing that seems likely to convince me to get a WiiU near launch is if my Wii gives up the ghost before i get the chance to play Xenoblade and Last Story. (I've already had to take my Wii in for repairs once, and it's started getting memory errors recently. And my first PS3 got the yellow light of death. This has been a horrible generation for me in terms of hardware reliability.) I just don't trust Nintendo to do a good job with hardcore gam
I agree about ginger ale, but diet coke and V8 also taste great when you're in the air. I like diet coke on the ground, but not so much V8. The only part of the article that seems factual is the part about the air being pretty dry, so i expect that anything liquid seems a lot better than it would under "normal" circumstances
Like everyone else commenting on the article i've found that any food i bring with me tastes pretty much the same as it does on the ground. The airlines may have trouble _preparing_ food at altitude, but there's nothing magical happening to your taste buds. If the airline food tastes bad it's either because they can't cook properly during the flight or it was just bad food to begin with.
This guy has insufficient imagination. When they tell me to turn off my electronic devices i pull out my book and start reading. (If i wasn't already busy doing that in the first place.) You know... a book? No, not an ebook, one of those old things made out of paper that you don't need to turn on and off.
Of course i'll usually take a break and look out the window when it's actually time to take off, but there's usually a long period of taxiing before the takeoff and then a long period between when we pass the cloud layer and can't see anything anymore and when they say it's okay to turn devices back on.
If people want to pay attention to reality they'll pay attention to reality. If they wan't to zone out they'll find a way, whether that be by electronics or something else.
Guy who does "marketing consulting" for the people trying to sell us the latest TV with all the gimmicks tells us to buy the latest TV with all the gimmicks. Color me shocked.
There are certainly a lot of things i'd like to know about which specs and features i needed to worry about and which i don't, i certainly did a lot of research on it the last time i bought a tv, but the first thing i put in the "just a marketing gimick that i don't care about" is 3D. I say this as someone who owns a 3DS and and never gets headaches from it. 3D works for me just fine, i just don't give a damn most of the time. And from what i've gathered from talking to other people i'm far from the only one. So the fact that this guys is pushing it makes me doubt everything else he has to say.
Slashdot Mirror
"Any mouse neurodevelopmental geneticists in the audience?"
Squeak! Squeak squeak squeak squeakums. Squeak squeak squeaker squeak!
"Tasmanian Liberal candidate for Bass, Andrew Nikolic"
So who do the Liberals have running for lead singer, guitar and drums?
I wish i was evolved enough to have points to mod you up with.
Ur doin it rong. You're supposed to set up the joke _before_ stopping your post in the middle of a sentence.
For example:
I don't care if they update the UI, as long as they also fix all the memory bloat and the crash problem that keeps happening whenever i tr[NO CARRIER].
Since i have neither the time nor the inclination to do so, i checked wikipedia instead. It claims:
In looking at possible increased risk to safety from organic food consumption, reviews have found that although there are theoretical increased risk from microbiological contamination due to increased manure use as fertilizer from organisms like E. coli O157:H7 during organic produce production, there does not exist sufficient evidence of actual incidence of outbreaks that can be clearly tied to organic food production to draw any firm conclusions.[2][3] Other possible sources of increased safety risk from organic food consumption like use of biological pesticides or the theoretical risk from mycotoxins from fungi grown on products due to the lack of effective organic compliant fungicides have likewise not been confirmed by rigorous studies in the scientific literature.[2][4]
So there's no evidence so far that it's more harmful. Sure they grow the stuff in shit, but that's pretty easy to clean off. Chemical pesticides and fertilizers seem to be a bit harder to eliminate completely once you've introduced them to the system. ("Natural" doesn't necessarily mean "healthier", but in a case like this it does mean it's a known quantity that we've had a few tens of thousands of years of experience dealing with.) And duh, no one ever claimed it was as efficient when measured solely on a yield per acre basis. So your claims seem to be one half unsubstantiated and one half straw man.
And as for the claim about taste by the grandparent poster, the next section on wikipedia seems to indicate that there's no evidence that "organic" food tastes any worse than industrial food. (Though i'm quite willing to believe that it doesn't taste particularly better in general either, but that's not the point from my perspective.)
I hate to be that guy, but... citation please? I'm not saying it's impossible, but industrial farming sure uses a lot of chemicals which have been known in the past to cause environmental damage. And my own experience as a kid when my family had a small garden and every report i've heard from anyone who has successfully tried growing their own food (ie using the same methods that "organic" farming is supposed to recreate) indicates that higher quality food is produced that way.
Well, unless he's trying to be punny. Migratory planets were proposed by Immanuel Velikovsky in, among other things, his 1950 book "Worlds in Collision". His ideas were picked up by James P Hogan for his "Giants" series and other books. (James P Hogan was notable for adapting crazy theories into interesting books in his early years, but then digressing later in life to the point where he never met a conspiracy theory he didn't like.)
Well it's at least half true. A couple years ago i just filled out my taxes the usual way, just copying numbers over from my W2 form into the appropriate boxes in the EZ whatever form. (I'm pretty sure i'd already started using FreeTaxUSA by that point, a service which seems perfectly adequate for the basic job, if not spectacular.)
As expected when i was done i found that i would be getting a moderate refund. (I try to set up my deductions to make sure that happens, the amount of interest i'm theoretically losing is pretty tiny, and the extra pain i'd have to go through if i found i owed more just isn't worth it.) So i hit "send" and promptly forgot about it. Then a couple weeks later i got a letter from the IRS telling me they'd corrected my taxes. Needless to say i was rather freaked out when i started reading the letter... until i got to the part where my new refund was about one or two hundred dollars _larger_ than what i'd come up with on my own. (And no, it wasn't a nice round number like the special "rebates" they keep giving us.) I don't know if i screwed up the math somewhere or just missed a really obvious deduction, but whatever it was the IRS caught it and decided i should get more money.
I have no idea how dependable that is, and i certainly don't expect them to catch all the deductions possible for people with a more complicated tax situation, but it seems if the IRS notices a problem they will correct it, no matter whose favor that mistake is in.
Isn't that answer a little simplistic? First, do those liners actually reflect the photons? Or do they absorb them?
Second, if you've got a relatively flat layer across the top of your face/head, then the only particles that could be bounced off the sheet are the ones that bounced back from your jaw at somewhere between a 180 and 225 degree angle (speaking very approximately.) I have no idea what the scatter pattern is like, but that would obviously only be a fraction of the photons that actually get reflected. The fact that they bother putting a lead apron on your body seems to indicate they feel there's some reasonable amount of imperfectly focused particles you should be expecting from your front, and i would expect that amount to be higher closer to where the beam is actually supposed to be focused.
They give you this big heavy blanket (lined with lead? I dunno) to lay across your body when they do the x-ray. They seem to think it's important to block off the areas they're not actually imaging. So why don't they give you something similar to lay across the top half of your face and head? Obviously it wouldn't stop everything, but you'd think it would help at least a little.
Agreed. When my old car got totaled a couple years ago i priced several different types of used cars, including the Prius. Since i was comparing used cars the price differential was lower, and since i live in California i expected to be paying higher than average for gas. I've forgotten exactly how the math worked out, but i found that the Prius would pay for itself in a reasonable amount of time (i think about 5-6 years.)
A little over two years later and i'm still quite happy with my purchase. Even more immediate than the gas savings though is the fact that i only have to stop to refuel about once every other week. It's also impressive how quiet it can be. And although it's certainly not worth the price of admission by itself, all the electronic charts on the dash panel relating to charging and mileage are kind of fun.
I'd certainly get another hybrid (used of course) if i was in the market now, but i'm not, because i've already got a hybrid i'm quite happy with. If this care gets totaled or when i've driven it into the ground then i'll be in the market for another hybrid, unless of course something even better like fuel cell cars have come along by that point.
So if we're not spending _all_ our free time and money trying to correct the injustices of the world, then we're "not doing anything"? It's not good enough to spend some time doing important things and some time having fun?
So as long as there are any problems in the world (and by the way, there will always be problems in the world) no one should ever have any fun. All effort should be devoted to righting wrongs and correcting injustices. No time to spend with loved ones. No time to create or enjoy art. No time to do any science unless that science is entirely directed at solving some existing crisis somewhere. We should all just be mindless cogs in the great machine, working in the sweatshop of freedom.
So wait, why is it that we want to do this? What's the point of even being alive if all you do is eat and sleep and work? Who would want to fight for the "freedom" to do nothing but fight for freedom the entire rest of your life?
Why would i have cared if the pictures showed any of the casualties? As i already stated, my objection was to the adjective used to describe pictures of a disaster (albeit a very small scale disaster) not the existence or sharing of the pictures themselves.
No, i'm saying if it were a joke it would be funny, but it definitely wasn't a joke. I've already pointed out in a previous response some comments where people _did_ make jokes and they _are_ funny, but the simple statement "there are shiny pictures" is not a joke.
You see, normally i agree with you when someone complains about other people on Slashdot making light of death. But see this? That's funny. so is this. And i'm sure there will be more funny posts later. Humor is an important part of dealing with tragedy.
However "Oooohhh! People have been hurt! And there are shiny pictures of it! Wanna see?!?" isn't being sensitive and it isn't funny either.
Both pilots and multiple civilians have been transported to a hospital.
Gizmodo has lots of shiny pictures and more detail.
Really Slashdot/Unknown Lamer? I've got a morbid sense of humor at times, and i'm not even saying i'm not interested in the pictures, but "lots of people are injured and some of them may die" and we've got "lots of shiny pictures" about it! seems a bit callous to me. I mean if it were actually part of some morbid joke it'd be fine, but it's not even a joke, it's just being totally insensitive for no good reason.
Seriously? You're either a troll or some kind of mental freak. I'm someone who's very bad with names. I often have to get introduced to someone three or four times before their name starts to stick. But even so i have learned probably well over a thousand names for well over a hundred different people. First names, last names, occasionally middle names, nicknames, email names, LJ names, twitter names, etc. I currently have exactly two phone numbers memorized. My current phone number, and the phone number of my parents, and i only have the second one memorized because it's the same one i grew up with.
There are hundreds of millions of people who need some kind of phonebook to keep track of phone numbers because the human brain, at least as it's used by the average person, is not used to remembering long strings of numbers that way. Very few of those people need to make lists to keep track of the names of their friends and immediate family. Your response makes absolutely no sense.
WP7's niche is that it totally integrates your contacts. If you know the same person in twitter, linkedin, your email db, facebook and more, WP7 seamlessly integrates them into the one person they are. That's it's killer app. The problem is that it takes more than a one-day test to really see this benefit so reviews are never going to "get it"."
I'm trying to figure out what the advantage of this is. I already have a tool that integrates multiple modes of communication into one one view of a person, it's called my brain. I know that the joe375@hotmail that i email with is the same WittyNickname that i have on my twitter feed and the same as the OlderNickname that i have in my LJ friends. How does Microsoft "seamlessly integrating" them make things better?
Although perhaps the fact that i have two distinct twitter accounts and two LJ accounts and three G+ accounts, all of which get variously used depending on how public i want to be and who i'm trying to communicate with, and know several other people who handle things the same way means that i'm not really the target audience.
I've also been on G+ since it got started, and although i have managed to slip under the radar, several friends and people i know got nailed by the real name policy. Their algorithm for detecting "fake" names is crap, but the shit you have to deal with if you get targeted is real.
Okay, i think we are indeed in violent agreement then :)
GOG was launched in 2008. Steam was launched in 2003, but they didn't add third-party games until 2005 and they didn't have major third party publishers until 2007.
And believe it or not, the games that are really cheap on GOG now were _not_ cheap when they first came out in the 90s. Of course like now you could save quite a lot if you were willing to wait and get them used (or just decided to pirate them,) but the people who bought them new were paying a lot of money. I believe PC games went for around $30-$40 then, which accounting for inflation was about $50-$60 now. I believe NES and SNES games were often around $50 and occasionally got as high as $70 (*cough* FF3/6) which is a pretty insane amount in today's dollars.
Yes there were shareware games you could download and sorta free door games on BBSes, but i think you're fooling yourself if you believe that those were mainstream in the same way that Steam is now. (And i'd be quite willing to believe that even Steam isn't mainstream compared to the number of people downloading $1 games on their smartphones and tablets or playing "free" games on Facebook or elsewhere online.)
I'm going to elaborate on what Kjella already said. I don't disagree with you on the idea that the casual gamers are here to stay and they seriously outnumber the hardcore games, i just disagree with the implication (based on the quote you're replying to) that it means Nintendo has nothing to worry about.
The Wii came out in 2006, and the world was a very different place then. The iPhone didn't exist, GOG didn't exist, even Steam had just started making third-party games available. There was no cheap and easy way to buy good games. If you played games you either had a comsole and bought $50 console games, you had a fairly up to date PC and bought $50 PC games, or you had an OK PC and played things like Bejeweled on the web. (Yes, there were people who pirated games and people who played emulator games and people who bought used games, but you get the general idea.)
In that context the Wii attracted a ton of casual gamers. People who'd either never gamed before or just played Bejeweled and such in their browser. It also attracted a decent number of "hardcore" gamers. Some of us thought that Wii Sports was pretty cool, and we believed, or at least hoped, that there would also be hardcore games for the system. It seemed new and creative.
And for awhile everything was good, the casual gamers got Wii Sports and Wii Play and Wii Sports and various dance games and various other casual games. Meanwhile the hardcore players got Twilight Princess and Mario Galaxy and Mario Kart Wii (which kind of hit it off with the casual crowd too i think.)
Fast-forward a little bit and you see the emergence of the dilema that Nintendo is in now. The iPhone came out and took off, and pretty soon $1 games were the norm. Shortly after that Andorid phones took off as well, and though one could argue about the relative depth of the two libraries, it too has a huge library of really cheap games. Meanwhile the indie gaming scene took off, and between PSN, XBox Live and Steam hardcore gamers can get good and creative games For anywhere from $10 or $15 to as low as $1-3 during some of Steam's bigger sales. Steam in particular has turned gaming on the PC from a hobby for those who update their graphics card every year to an almost console like experience. Then on top of that the iPad and Android tablets started coming out, and those $1 games we were playing on phones are suddenly much easier to see and control
So now Nintendo has mostly pissed away the loyalty of the hardcore gamers. They finally changed their stance on Xenoblade and the Last Story (kinda) but not before really mishandling their initial response to Operation Rainfall. At the same time sales of the Wii and Wii games have been plumeting. The fall in hardware sales is kind of expected, and one can argue about the reason for the software slump, but it is certainly arguable that the people who used to be buying Wii software, even if only occasionally, have gotten distracted by the cheaper and more convenient portable gaming options.
If those trends hold true then Nintendo may end up being in a very dangerous middle ground between the hardcore and the casual. Their revelation of the WiiU at E3 last year seems to reflect both the problem and their awareness of the problem. They showed off a console that looked like a half-baked combination of a Wii and an iPad, while promising that it would allow for hardcore games with high quality graphics like you see on the PS3 and 360.
Don't get me wrong, even after their misteps the past two generations i'm still a Nintendo fan, but at the moment the only thing that seems likely to convince me to get a WiiU near launch is if my Wii gives up the ghost before i get the chance to play Xenoblade and Last Story. (I've already had to take my Wii in for repairs once, and it's started getting memory errors recently. And my first PS3 got the yellow light of death. This has been a horrible generation for me in terms of hardware reliability.) I just don't trust Nintendo to do a good job with hardcore gam
I agree about ginger ale, but diet coke and V8 also taste great when you're in the air. I like diet coke on the ground, but not so much V8. The only part of the article that seems factual is the part about the air being pretty dry, so i expect that anything liquid seems a lot better than it would under "normal" circumstances
Like everyone else commenting on the article i've found that any food i bring with me tastes pretty much the same as it does on the ground. The airlines may have trouble _preparing_ food at altitude, but there's nothing magical happening to your taste buds. If the airline food tastes bad it's either because they can't cook properly during the flight or it was just bad food to begin with.
This guy has insufficient imagination. When they tell me to turn off my electronic devices i pull out my book and start reading. (If i wasn't already busy doing that in the first place.) You know... a book? No, not an ebook, one of those old things made out of paper that you don't need to turn on and off.
Of course i'll usually take a break and look out the window when it's actually time to take off, but there's usually a long period of taxiing before the takeoff and then a long period between when we pass the cloud layer and can't see anything anymore and when they say it's okay to turn devices back on.
If people want to pay attention to reality they'll pay attention to reality. If they wan't to zone out they'll find a way, whether that be by electronics or something else.
Guy who does "marketing consulting" for the people trying to sell us the latest TV with all the gimmicks tells us to buy the latest TV with all the gimmicks. Color me shocked.
There are certainly a lot of things i'd like to know about which specs and features i needed to worry about and which i don't, i certainly did a lot of research on it the last time i bought a tv, but the first thing i put in the "just a marketing gimick that i don't care about" is 3D. I say this as someone who owns a 3DS and and never gets headaches from it. 3D works for me just fine, i just don't give a damn most of the time. And from what i've gathered from talking to other people i'm far from the only one. So the fact that this guys is pushing it makes me doubt everything else he has to say.