Personally i thought Hitchhiker's was just okay, but that the two Dirk Gently books were much better.
Of course i'm a real mixed bag of opinions. Monty Python is hit or miss for me (although the Holy Grail is definitely a hit,) i haven't liked Black Adder so far but i've only seen one or two episodes, and i love Red Dwarf and Coupling.
They just need to create a tiered system. The top 10% in terms of hours on the clock/work produced/whatever will be given the luxery cabins as described above, and every time someone questions the conditions of the workers they'll trot those people out to speak out about how great life is there. As soon as the quality or the quantity of your works slips however you get sent down to steerage.
The people down in the holds will be working their asses off to try and make it out, and the people up above will be working even harder to keep their positions and will be too busy to take advantage of the luxeries offered. *removes tinfoil hat*
...they wanted to avoid using Chinese or any other Asian language that might shackle their invented universe to actual historical events.
I've read, watched, listened to and played thousands of media works that used the english language but which did not feel that use shackled them to any particular version of history or even basic reality.
"We want to do it cause it seemed cool" would be a perfectly valid reason. "Not wanting to shackled to actual historical events" sounds like some post-modern(?) excuse to make their choice sound more important than it really was.
Microsoft is trying to beat everyone to the market with a system that can truly take advantage of HDTVs, I believe this may be a good strategy for them. The jump from standard def to high def is going to be more noticeable then the jump between the that last gen of consoles to the current one.
So they're targeting those with too much money or too little sense? I don't know if the XBox2 is going to do well or not, but if _that's_ their marketing plan i'm going to downgrade their odds a few notches.
The PS2 sold very well, in part, because it could replace the need for a DVD player which at the time could cost almost as much as the PS2 itself, so it was targeting just about everyone with a tv who liked movies at that time except for the leading edge who'd already gotten a good DVD player.
The XBox on the other hand is (if what you said is true) targeting those who already have an expensive HDTV, or those who are willing to shell out the cash to get one in order to experience the increased capabilities of the XBox2. In other words they are specifically targeting the leading edge who have spent or are willing to spend a significant amount of money, rather than the mass market which wants to save a few (hundred) bucks if possible.
Maybe if they get in good with the technophiles then the word of mouth will help them sell well with the mass market, but that failed to work with the Dreamcast, so who knows.
Nice dodge attempt. Next time respond to the badly-formated post to keep everything together rather than starting a whole second thread. I'll repost what i said in response to you earlier.
In particular the question boils down to whether the money spend on human space flight now would be better spent on general technological advancement and not wasted on giant solid rocket boosters.
Perhaps a better question is why not reduce the DOD budget by a few percent and do _both_?
And there's something to be said about learning by doing. We could sit here on earth till the sun goes nova (or whatever) telling ourselves that we're not quite ready yet, but after that _next_ technological advancement we'll start those space colonies going.
In particular the question boils down to whether the money spend on human space flight now would be better spent on general technological advancement and not wasted on giant solid rocket boosters.
Perhaps a better question is why not reduce the DOD budget by a few percent and do _both_?
And there's something to be said about learning by doing. We could sit here on earth till the sun goes nova (or whatever) telling ourselves that we're not quite ready yet, but after that _next_ technological advancement we'll start those space colonies going.
So even though there is ZERO evidence to support the fact that it was written in hebrew, you're going to believe it anyway?
wow, if that doesn't exemplify the typical mindset of a christian....
Wow, if that doesn't exemplify the typical mindset of someone who's making a fool out of himself by insulting people on the basis of random assumptions.
First of all, i'm an athiest. (Well, mostly, i've got some shinto and various other pagan leanings, but i'm certainly not a christian by any means.)
Second of all, you seem to be misrepresenting my point, either intentionally or unintentionally. If by "it" you meant the new testament i haven't claimed that "it" was written in hebrew. I have maintained that "it" was based off of earlier written works that may have been in hebrew.
There is quite a lot of evidence that jesus and his original followers were jewish. I think that without any evidence pointing one way or the other that many people of that group who kept any written records wrote at least some of them in hebrew. Those records were then copied and translated numerous times before being incorporated into the work that eventually became known as the new testament. (Presuming of course that the people who wrote the new testament actually had any basis for their work other than campfire stories, which seems likely, even if you don't actually believe the mythology.)
I said i'd listen to any evidence presented to the contrary. If you have any proof that jews in jerusalam didn't ever write in hebrew around 30 AD then please present it and enlighten me. I'm making a logical assumption based on what evidence i have, you seem intent on sticking to a belief which you have presented no logical basis for.
And last of all, why would the typical christian want to maintain an irrational belief that the new testament was originally writen in hebrew? Last i heard many christians had some irrational dislike of jews. Even if i _had_ said that using it to jump to the conclusion that i must be a christian is completly illogical.
I'm not a biblical scholar so if anyone presents evidence to the contrary i'll believe it. However even if the first version that was actually refered to as the new testament was written in greek or aramaic i suspect that at least some of the documents it was based on were originally written in hebrew.
Perhaps it somehow escaped your notice but Jesus and most of his original followers, ie the people who would have been writing down the first version of what would eventually become the new testament, were jewish.
What was their real reasoning for this? I'm failing to understand what the issue with "pressuring game publishers" is. If they're not actually behind schedule the only other reason i can think of is that they're worried if they reveal too much now then the PS3 will be old hat compared to the X-Box 2 and Nintendo Revolution when E3 comes around.
If in the process of comparison you find a search engine that can actually handle punctuation please let me know. Altavista used to be able to do it, but sometime in the last few years in the process of "competing" with google they dropped the feature.
I _used_ to go to altavista everytime i had a search that involved specific punctuation, usually some kind of coding question. Now i just get frustrated with google while trying to find some related term i can add in that will give me the results i want.
What i want to know is when is Almost Live going to come out on DVD?! Maybe they think it won't sell well because it has a lot of topical material relevant to the time it was produced, but people still watch reruns of Saturday Night Live and i think Almost Live would fare just as well.
(And if you think this is off topic you need to check up on your Bill Nye history)
First of all the original poster claimed that the correlation between the two did _not_ make sense, so that doesn't actually reduce the number of mysteries at all.
Second of all what you just said doesn't make any sense either. The homeopathic study wasn't based on a comparison to placebo effect. I'm guessing what the original poster mean when he said "placebo controlled study" is one in which the placebo affect was accounted for, either that or he just didn't understand the experiment, which was not conducted on an actual person and therefore didn't involve any psychological effects at all. So unless you believe the placebo effect is a result of the psychic influence of the person doing the testing it doesn't have anything to do with that case.
Congratulations, through carefull and diligent study you have managed to find something that doesn't make sense in an article entirely about things that don't make sense. For your next trick will you show that 2+2 does not equal 7?:)
It is a unique game in that no one has really done anything like it before, at least as far as i know, but it's certainly not anything that no one has ever thought of before. I'm sure everyone who has played both series (or games from any two similar series) has wished that once that got the colony on Alpha Centauri started in Civilization that they could then progress to a game of Master of Orion. I've actually had discussions with others about how far you could stretch the process back in time (i believe E.V.O. came up at least once) so the meme is definitely out there.
I do wonder a bit about how play balance will work. In such strategy games a series of small time saving maneuvers early on cascades into a huge advantage in the late game. In this situation you're increasing that process by another order of magnitude. There are crazy-good people who can hit spaceflight in Civ in the BCs or something similarly insane. The space portion would be a cake-walk if they got to start a couple hundred turns before everyone else. There is of course the time honored tradition of having the AI "cheat" and just starting them all going whenever the humans hit space. Or arranging the storyline so that it seems reasonable that the aliens stayed at home until the humans started expanding, but Galactic Civilizations is the only 4x space game i've seen that has had even a semi-reasonable explanation for such a thing.
In one of those cases the government shouldn't be telling communities not to build local wifi coverage unless that government already has plans to do it for them, and in the other case the government shouldn't be telling communities not to build local wifi coverage under any circumstances.
If it is supposed to be a free market issue then the communities should have every right to compete with the telcos, since that's what the whole idea of a free market economy is based on.
They didn't bother to balance the game properly, so they just gave other players an unfair advantage.
That makes no sense at all. In one sense of thinking balancing is exactly what they _did_ do.
If you want to talk in terms of more traditional balancing, to make sure that one one car/team/whatever is equal in stregnth, or has an equal balance of strengths and weaknesses, to all the others, then it doesn't address the issue we're talking about at all. More balanced play acutally makes things _tougher_ on newbies. With unbalanced play an experienced player might choose to give the newbie the stronger team or the newbie might stumble across some combination of factors that the more experienced players haven't discovered yet that gives them a big edge (unlikely, yes, but not impossible.)
In a perfectly balanced game the newbie is going to get their ass kicked everytime until they learn the tactics and get better.
I agree that the rubber-banding (which is _not_ a new feature) can get very annoying at times, but it is not due to lazy programmers. The programmers could have done a lot of other things to "balance" the game between newbies and experts, like _always_ giving the guy in last place a spiked shell, but the designers decided that rubber-banding was a better solution.
So it is "Safer" and "easier" to "shut the hell up" about something that is politically incorect if the price is a large amount of suffering? I wonder what would have happened to the Civil Rights movement and Womens Sufferage (among other movements) if people thought that way in the 20's and 50's/60's.
There's quite a bit of difference between the two situations. In the civil rights movement people felt a moral imperative to help those who were being treated unfairly. What exactly is the moral imperative to argue that women aren't good at math and science? Second of all the the president of an institution like that is just as much a PR figure as anything else and is expected to keep in mind that he represents his school (notice that we're not even told what his name is, only his office.) What he said wasn't helping any disenfranchised groups and it wasn't good PR for his school either.
So in his case yes, he should have taken the "safer" and "easier" route and "shut the hell up" and left the grandstanding to people who didn't agree to accept millions of dollars to represent an entity with a vested interest in this area.
I'd have to go check my reciept, but i'm pretty sure i paid at least that much for the one in LA (for second row seats) and i didn't get any "meet & greet" =P
Seriously though, I wonder if this guy also bitches about the fact that his car stops when he runs out of gas.
Which guy? The one who wrote the article? From TFA: "If cars modelled this behavior, you might drive your car from New York to Miami, run out of gas in Fort Lauderdale, 10 miles from your destination, and suddenly find yourself back in New York."
He thinks cars running out of gas display the _correct_ behavior, and he wishes computers were more like cars in that regard; you run out of energy and you stop where you are, not go back to where you started.
Obviously implementing such a system with a computer is hard, but it's a nice idea.
Slashdot Mirror
I in turn will recomend James Alan Gardner. Of course you have to be willing to accept quite a large dollop of dark with your humor.
Of course i'm a real mixed bag of opinions. Monty Python is hit or miss for me (although the Holy Grail is definitely a hit,) i haven't liked Black Adder so far but i've only seen one or two episodes, and i love Red Dwarf and Coupling.
The people down in the holds will be working their asses off to try and make it out, and the people up above will be working even harder to keep their positions and will be too busy to take advantage of the luxeries offered. *removes tinfoil hat*
I've read, watched, listened to and played thousands of media works that used the english language but which did not feel that use shackled them to any particular version of history or even basic reality.
"We want to do it cause it seemed cool" would be a perfectly valid reason. "Not wanting to shackled to actual historical events" sounds like some post-modern(?) excuse to make their choice sound more important than it really was.
So they're targeting those with too much money or too little sense? I don't know if the XBox2 is going to do well or not, but if _that's_ their marketing plan i'm going to downgrade their odds a few notches.
The PS2 sold very well, in part, because it could replace the need for a DVD player which at the time could cost almost as much as the PS2 itself, so it was targeting just about everyone with a tv who liked movies at that time except for the leading edge who'd already gotten a good DVD player.
The XBox on the other hand is (if what you said is true) targeting those who already have an expensive HDTV, or those who are willing to shell out the cash to get one in order to experience the increased capabilities of the XBox2. In other words they are specifically targeting the leading edge who have spent or are willing to spend a significant amount of money, rather than the mass market which wants to save a few (hundred) bucks if possible.
Maybe if they get in good with the technophiles then the word of mouth will help them sell well with the mass market, but that failed to work with the Dreamcast, so who knows.
---
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Speaking of bands, that's a wonderful sig :)
In particular the question boils down to whether the money spend on human space flight now would be better spent on general technological advancement and not wasted on giant solid rocket boosters.
Perhaps a better question is why not reduce the DOD budget by a few percent and do _both_?
And there's something to be said about learning by doing. We could sit here on earth till the sun goes nova (or whatever) telling ourselves that we're not quite ready yet, but after that _next_ technological advancement we'll start those space colonies going.
Perhaps a better question is why not reduce the DOD budget by a few percent and do _both_?
And there's something to be said about learning by doing. We could sit here on earth till the sun goes nova (or whatever) telling ourselves that we're not quite ready yet, but after that _next_ technological advancement we'll start those space colonies going.
Somehow i'm failing to find the significant moral highground in "You can't just go around eating those people! We want to enslave them!"
wow, if that doesn't exemplify the typical mindset of a christian....
Wow, if that doesn't exemplify the typical mindset of someone who's making a fool out of himself by insulting people on the basis of random assumptions.
First of all, i'm an athiest. (Well, mostly, i've got some shinto and various other pagan leanings, but i'm certainly not a christian by any means.)
Second of all, you seem to be misrepresenting my point, either intentionally or unintentionally. If by "it" you meant the new testament i haven't claimed that "it" was written in hebrew. I have maintained that "it" was based off of earlier written works that may have been in hebrew.
There is quite a lot of evidence that jesus and his original followers were jewish. I think that without any evidence pointing one way or the other that many people of that group who kept any written records wrote at least some of them in hebrew. Those records were then copied and translated numerous times before being incorporated into the work that eventually became known as the new testament. (Presuming of course that the people who wrote the new testament actually had any basis for their work other than campfire stories, which seems likely, even if you don't actually believe the mythology.)
I said i'd listen to any evidence presented to the contrary. If you have any proof that jews in jerusalam didn't ever write in hebrew around 30 AD then please present it and enlighten me. I'm making a logical assumption based on what evidence i have, you seem intent on sticking to a belief which you have presented no logical basis for.
And last of all, why would the typical christian want to maintain an irrational belief that the new testament was originally writen in hebrew? Last i heard many christians had some irrational dislike of jews. Even if i _had_ said that using it to jump to the conclusion that i must be a christian is completly illogical.
I'm not a biblical scholar so if anyone presents evidence to the contrary i'll believe it. However even if the first version that was actually refered to as the new testament was written in greek or aramaic i suspect that at least some of the documents it was based on were originally written in hebrew.
Perhaps it somehow escaped your notice but Jesus and most of his original followers, ie the people who would have been writing down the first version of what would eventually become the new testament, were jewish.
What was their real reasoning for this? I'm failing to understand what the issue with "pressuring game publishers" is. If they're not actually behind schedule the only other reason i can think of is that they're worried if they reveal too much now then the PS3 will be old hat compared to the X-Box 2 and Nintendo Revolution when E3 comes around.
I _used_ to go to altavista everytime i had a search that involved specific punctuation, usually some kind of coding question. Now i just get frustrated with google while trying to find some related term i can add in that will give me the results i want.
Wow! They make cross platform controllers that insert Link as a playable character into any game you play? That's so cool!
(And if you think this is off topic you need to check up on your Bill Nye history)
Second of all what you just said doesn't make any sense either. The homeopathic study wasn't based on a comparison to placebo effect. I'm guessing what the original poster mean when he said "placebo controlled study" is one in which the placebo affect was accounted for, either that or he just didn't understand the experiment, which was not conducted on an actual person and therefore didn't involve any psychological effects at all. So unless you believe the placebo effect is a result of the psychic influence of the person doing the testing it doesn't have anything to do with that case.
Congratulations, through carefull and diligent study you have managed to find something that doesn't make sense in an article entirely about things that don't make sense. For your next trick will you show that 2+2 does not equal 7? :)
I do wonder a bit about how play balance will work. In such strategy games a series of small time saving maneuvers early on cascades into a huge advantage in the late game. In this situation you're increasing that process by another order of magnitude. There are crazy-good people who can hit spaceflight in Civ in the BCs or something similarly insane. The space portion would be a cake-walk if they got to start a couple hundred turns before everyone else. There is of course the time honored tradition of having the AI "cheat" and just starting them all going whenever the humans hit space. Or arranging the storyline so that it seems reasonable that the aliens stayed at home until the humans started expanding, but Galactic Civilizations is the only 4x space game i've seen that has had even a semi-reasonable explanation for such a thing.
If it is supposed to be a free market issue then the communities should have every right to compete with the telcos, since that's what the whole idea of a free market economy is based on.
There's another review of the concert over at Games Are Fun
That makes no sense at all. In one sense of thinking balancing is exactly what they _did_ do.
If you want to talk in terms of more traditional balancing, to make sure that one one car/team/whatever is equal in stregnth, or has an equal balance of strengths and weaknesses, to all the others, then it doesn't address the issue we're talking about at all. More balanced play acutally makes things _tougher_ on newbies. With unbalanced play an experienced player might choose to give the newbie the stronger team or the newbie might stumble across some combination of factors that the more experienced players haven't discovered yet that gives them a big edge (unlikely, yes, but not impossible.)
In a perfectly balanced game the newbie is going to get their ass kicked everytime until they learn the tactics and get better.
I agree that the rubber-banding (which is _not_ a new feature) can get very annoying at times, but it is not due to lazy programmers. The programmers could have done a lot of other things to "balance" the game between newbies and experts, like _always_ giving the guy in last place a spiked shell, but the designers decided that rubber-banding was a better solution.
There's quite a bit of difference between the two situations. In the civil rights movement people felt a moral imperative to help those who were being treated unfairly. What exactly is the moral imperative to argue that women aren't good at math and science? Second of all the the president of an institution like that is just as much a PR figure as anything else and is expected to keep in mind that he represents his school (notice that we're not even told what his name is, only his office.) What he said wasn't helping any disenfranchised groups and it wasn't good PR for his school either.
So in his case yes, he should have taken the "safer" and "easier" route and "shut the hell up" and left the grandstanding to people who didn't agree to accept millions of dollars to represent an entity with a vested interest in this area.
I'd have to go check my reciept, but i'm pretty sure i paid at least that much for the one in LA (for second row seats) and i didn't get any "meet & greet" =P
Which guy? The one who wrote the article? From TFA: "If cars modelled this behavior, you might drive your car from New York to Miami, run out of gas in Fort Lauderdale, 10 miles from your destination, and suddenly find yourself back in New York."
He thinks cars running out of gas display the _correct_ behavior, and he wishes computers were more like cars in that regard; you run out of energy and you stop where you are, not go back to where you started.
Obviously implementing such a system with a computer is hard, but it's a nice idea.