"Study reveals flaws in ballots, voter errors may have cost Gore victory"
"If that standard had been adopted statewide, the study shows a slim, 42-vote margin for Gore."
"The consortium looked at what might have happened if a statewide recount had included these overvotes as well and found that Gore would have had a margin of fewer than 200 votes."
"Had many of these voters not marked a minor candidate in the second column, Gore would have netted thousands of additional votes as compared with Bush."
(Yeah, i'm being selective, but so were you.)
So who would have won would have depended on how the votes were counted. Too bad the Republicans had to get the US Supreme Court to interfere before the best method was determined and the recount was carried out to figure out who really got the most votes.
This makes the data flawed, or more specifically the data gathering method flawed as well as the conclusions.
I will also make this simple, the only way survey data itself can be flawed is if there is a bias in the question, or a problem with the sampling. The results can be used to make bad decisions, but that's a problem with the analysis, not the survey itself. A survey that shows that 95% of the perisoners in the US think that prisoners should be paroled earlier instead of building new prisons to hold them is a perfectly valid survey. Using that survey to justify a decision to parole prisoners rather than building more prisons would be stupid.
The survey shows how many Japanese play online games and intend to in the future, it shows what the respondents think would convince them to play online games more. The survey concluds that in order to increase online game play _IN_JAPAN_ the things that the _JAPANESE_ respondants said they wanted should be done. That is a perfectly valid survey, and a perfectly valid conclusion to draw. How many Americans play online games and what they want has NO impact on how many Japanese play online games and what they want. A decision about whether the number of Japanese online gamers _needs_ to be increased or if a company should focus on Japan or America would benefit from a similar survey of American gamers. However for the use to which they are putting this survey it is completly valid.
The survey says _nothing_ about American gamers, or how Japense gamers compare to American gamers, nor was it intended to. Any such conclusions you or anyone else draw from it is completly your own imagining and not supported one way or ther other by the data in the survey.
The survey fails to factor in the already established obvious fact that online computer gaming is vastly less popular than single player and console gaming. Just this already makes their entire effort look silly, but despite that, the conclusions are misleading because they give connotations that this characteristic is purely Japanese in nature because their data is so highly limited and selective.
Yes, the survey _does_ factor that in. That's _why_ they asked the question about whether or not the respondants played online games. How else do you expect them to factor it in? It can't be an established _fact_ unless they either ask the question themself, or cite a previous survey or study that asks the exact same question. Your opinion that more people play console games than online does not make it a fact.
The survey says that most Japense gamers aren't interested in online games, that is true. 50% is much larger than 20%. It doesn't say whether or not they like them more or less than American gamers, and that really isn't important to what this survey is looking at, namely, how many _Japanese_ gamers play online games and what would convince more _Japanese_ gamers to try them?
The survey's conclusions telling us Japanese are less interested in online gaming than console gaming is like a survey telling us that most Americans in New York City speak English. We already knew that, and it's not just limited to New York City. All of America speaks English. So what is it trying to say in the first place?
If a survey was taken to determine what it would take to convince more people in New York to speak English, finding out how many of them already speak English would be a pretty important first question. Perhaps the people funding the survey think it would be important to promote English if 5% of the population doesn't speak it already, but not if only 1% doesn't. The fact that 15% of the people in California don't speak English is completly irrelevant to the survey, just as how many gamers in America play online games is irrelevant to people who are concerned with how to increase online gaming in _Japan_.
Even if the people making decisions based on a survey like this were to look at a similar survey in America, it is still important that the question
Your original statement: "Yet FFXI has how many subscribers just in Japan alone? Far more people than this survey covered. Data == flawed."
A survey works by polling a small number of people to statistically determine the nature of a much larger population. Any option which gets a significant number of responses (above the margin of error,) such as people who said they've played online games in this poll did, will mean that far more people in the full population fit this option than the survey covered. To claim that this means the data is flawed betrays a complete misunderstanding of how surveys work, or a complete failure of english to describe what you're talking about.
But pretty damn big for a MMORPG. FFXI has overtaken Everquest in subscriptions, becoming the most popular MMORPG currently in existence.
So? How well FF11 is doing compared to Everquest or any other online game has nothing to do with how popular online games are compared to single player games. This point is completly irrelevant.
This is all comes back to the fact that my understanding of surveys != flawed. Single player console games being vastly more popular than MMORPGs is an obvious fact. It has nothing to do with whether or not the Japanese like them more or less than multiplayer, it's a worldwide trend. Similar statistics can be taken in America. There are simply less people playing MMORPGs. That doesn't mean that "Japanese [are] not that interested in online videogaming." The survey presents overly selective and limited statistics to draw a conclusion that is misleading.
Apparently your complaint is about the CONCLUSIONS and not the DATA. You start off by saying that it's obvious that single player games are more popular than online games, which is _exactly_ what the DATA said, the data you claimed before was flawed. The survey does not present overly selective and limited statistics, it claims to show what gamers in Japan think of online gaming in general, and unless you can show a problem in their methodology it does exactly that.
However you claim that this doesn't mean that the Japanese don't like online gaming. Actually it shows pretty clearly that on average the Japanese don't like online gaming, but the point you're trying to make i think is that the Japanese don't necessarily like online gaming less than other groups, such as Americans. This might quite well be true, and if the survey had actually concluded that, you would be quite right in critisizing it.
The survey presents overly selective and limited statistics to draw a conclusion that is misleading.
The only conclusion i see is "The report concludes that while Japan's net infrastructure has improved greatly over the course of a year, work remains to be done on more useful payment systems and more interesting content." Which says nothing about how popular online games are compared to any other country, and makes no value judgements about the "popularity" of the games. All it says is that things have improved, but they could be improved even more (gain more players than they currently have) by changing certain aspects.
So it seems that you drew your own conclusions from the statistics, blamed the survey for that conclusion, and then tried to claim that the data was flawed even though it wan't the data you had the problem with originally.
Interestingly, i presume there is well over 1 million gamers in japan. In fact i'm very sure there are over 5 million since there are individual games that have sold that many copies in japan. Which means that if 20% have tried a premium online game, at least 1 million in the general population have done so. So if the subscription rate for FF11 is around a couple hundred thousand (does anyone have some current figures for this?) and more are playing FF11 than Everquest, what else have the all the rest of them been playing?
in which case it's entirely possible that the number who have played an online game have dropped.
in which case it's entirely possible that the percentage who have played an online game have dropped. See, it's an easy mistake to make even if you know the difference if you're not watching your words carefully:)
Yet FFXI has how many subscribers just in Japan alone? Far more people than this survey covered. Data == flawed.
And how many gamers are there total in Japan? Far _far_ more people than this survey covered. Your understanding of how surveys work == flawed.
And as for FF11, last i heard it was a few hundred thousand subscribers at most, which is pretty damn small for a Final Fantasy game. The franchise as a whole has sold about 50 million units, and the later titles were selling more than the early ones i'm pretty sure. Unfortunatly i can't remember where i saw a chart that breaks down sales by title.
Squarenix may be making tons of money from that comparitively small group of people because of the recuring subscription charges so it might by a huge financial success (or it might not, i don't know,) but as far as reaching a large percentage of the gamers in Japan goes FF11 is an abysmal failure.
They say that the number of people who have never played online games has *risen*. How exactly does that work?
They _don't_ say that the number of people has risen, they say the _percentage_ has risen. It entirely depends on how many people they asked. They might be more gamers to ask this year, in which case it's entirely possible that the number who have played an online game have dropped.
you need to leave your place and go outside more often.
Huh? I'm not sure what you're trying to imply. I get outside pleanty. Given some of the stories i've heard about Xbox Live, any mistaken assumptions i make about the average person on it being competent, civil and inteligent is probably based on spending TOO MUCH time outside and not enough time on Xbox Live (or any time for that matter.)
So if you meant to say that backwards, i do spend too much time outside with real people and friends to be able to make well informed judgements about the people on Xbox Live. I'm not sure if you meant me to feel insulted or what, but i'm just confused.
Except for the fact that I, as a user, need the ability to easily look people up and add them to my friends list on Xbox Live. For that you need a unique user ID. That's the reason why the unique key is the user nick.
You need a unique key for a LOT more than that, that's just the most obvious purpose to the user.
As for easily looking people up, the first time i try to call someone i can't just tell the phone "Sarah Jones" and expect it to figure it out. I need to know a phone number. Once i know that number i can program it in (assuming i have a more modern phone at least) and just go by Sarah after that, because _i_ know who i mean when using my own personal phone list. There's no reason a Xbox Live friends list can't work the same way.
If they don't have it already, Xbox Live could even include brief profiles, so rather than saying "I'm the LeetKiller with ID 1023826141" you could just say "I'm the LeetKiller whose profile says I'm from LA, California."
Which, if you took the time to read and understand, is EXACTLY what I said. If you have to have a unique, then why not the gamertags, it's is what the gamers identify themselves as, which was the point that I was arguing to the parent posts.
Because, as quite clearly stated by me and others, using the gamertags as unique IDs leads to conflicts between people who want similar or the same names. The proposed solution was explicitly proposed as a solution to that propblem. Stating that if there are unique IDs it might as well be gamertags, as you keep asserting, completly ignores the proposed problem and just takes us back to square one.
As to why we're considering it a problem, why should person A have more right to a certain name just because they signed up X seconds before person B? Sure, it's cool to be the one and only person with your name, but that's not the way it works in real life, and it won't necessarily work that way online forever. It's too bad that if i try googling myself that multiple people show up, and it probably makes it harder for old friends to find me, but i don't think parents shouldn't be allowed to give future children my name anymore.
My _friends_ will know that i'm fragbastard and not frag_bastard. Friends can keep track of each other just fine, they don't confuse Josh Smith with Josh Jones. People who don't know either us well will get confused by fragbastard and frag_bastard, but what do i care about the people i don't know?
Vinge. Vernor Vinge. I know how to spell it, my fingers must have slipped or something. And yes i previewed, but somehow missed that =P
As long as i'm posting again however, I'll add Jude Fisher, another new author whose first book (fantasy) took me a little bit to get into but was strongly and amusingly reminiscent of Shakespeare when i did so. (Midsummer Nights Dream i think, or whichever one where everyone ends up romantically entagled with the wrong person.)
Also Paula Volsky, who does quasi-historical fantasy, and Michael Flynn and Stephen Baxter for SF. And just for completeness' sake, there's also Joan D. Vinge (Vernor Vinge's ex-wife, but a good author in her on right. I'm curious if they met because of their writing, or if one of them picked it up from the other after their marriage.)
Prove it. The number of people reading SF is a teeny-tiny fraction of the population. A fraction that tends to be marginalized anyway. Their influence on the culture at large is pretty weak, so the portion of their influence attributable to sf&f is smaller still. You're just in the middle of it so it looks larger than it really is because you are so close up on it. Perspective.
Finding hard numbers on book sales and readership is difficult, however please explain the success of movies like Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, The Matrix, Shrek, X-Men, X-Men 2, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Terminator, Star Trek, i could go on, but you get the point.
I think the influence of SF and Fantasy is pretty darn clear, regardless of how many actual readers of the original material there are. If things like Shakespeare (incidentally, one of the most readable of the "classic" authors as well as the most relevant) are being justified because of the influence they've had on later literature and media, you can't then say that SF and Fantasy literature is irrelevant. Whether a movie based on a SF or Fantasy work is more or less culturally valuable than a movie based on a Shakespeare play is debatable (especially given some of the remakes of Shakespeare i've heard about) but there's no denying that they've both had an influence.
It doesn't even have to be that formal, you just need to find some other readers who have the same tastes as you. I've got several friends who read the same kind of books as me, so if i read something i like i'll encourage them to read it too. I may have to wait a few weeks or months before one of them gets around to it, but i'll have someone to discuss it with sooner or later. Sometimes it's been long enough that i feel encouraged to go back and read the book myself if it was especially good, which just adds to the value.
And of course those friends do the same thing with me, so i get clued in to some good books without having to do the work myself, and as soon as i finish there's immediatly someone waiting to discuss it with me.
I started reading at a pretty young age, and it probably has vastly increased my vocabulary. However it also vastly increased the number of words i know that i can read and understand but can't spell or pronounce correctly:)
I'll throw in my two cents as well. Besides George R. R. Martin and Robin Hobb (who was mentioned later in the thread) i'd also suggest taking a look at Jane Lindskold (who does good urban fantasy,) Kate Elliott, Sara Douglass (somewhat generic, but some orginality too, and strong female characters,) Guy Gavriel Kay (OTHER than for his "Fionovar Tapestry" trilogy, which was generic shlock,) and Steven Brust. And to promote a couple lesser known authors who are just getting started, but i think have some promise, Naomi Kritzer and Joanne Bertin.
If we move on into science fiction, there's S.M. Stirling, James Alan Gardner, Vernor Vinger, (who as just posted on slashdot, is coming out with a new book soon) Sheri S. Tepper (if you don't mind a strong feminist slant in your fiction) and Steven Barnes.
I'm sure there are more out there, quite possibly even on my bookshelves, but that's what i can remember at the moment.
which brings us back to unique names, why not use that...
Oh they have! that'll be the Gamertag.
Have you not been paying attention, or are you being intentionaly obtuse?
The problem is that they can not have two people using the same nick because the nick is currently the unique ID. Using unique ID numbers along with nicks, so as to allow people to choose whatever nick they want, does not "bring us back to unique names," because a unique ID has always been required from step one by the nature of the system. The only question is what the unique key should be.
And i hate to tell you this, but in the real world there are people with the _same_name_ who are in fact _different_people_. And we seem to deal with it okay. I may know several Sarahs, but i have no trouble telling them apart. If it ever comes up in conversation and there's the possibility of confusion i can say "Sarah X" or "Sarah who lives in Place_Y" and everyone deals just fine. I expect it would be the same way in XBox Live or any other online system. It seems unlikely that the average person would have too many people on their friends list with the same name. They'd just have to put in the unique ID once when they added them, and that would be that.
If you're confused because the only people who will play with you are frag_bastard, fragbastard, and fr4g|3astard, i expect that's more of a commentary on your personality rather than the feasability of the system.
Dishonest how? Wrong why?
Or are you just picking nits because you cannot find any actual factual errors in the movie?
First of all, it's not made clear that he's showing Heston at a seperate, later speach, and it seems quite likely he expected the audience to be confused by the editing technique. However what's really dishonest and wrong it's the part right _after_ that where he splices together three sentences that were originally scattered about a 13 paragraph speach, in order to make Heston sound as bad as possible.
Ethically that is completly abhorent to me. I agree with Moore's politics in both Bowling For Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, however that does not excuse lies and/or misrepresentations in order to convince people you're right. If you can't support it with the truth, don't support it at all.
Sure what Heston actually said isn't great, but it's a lot nicer and more reasonable than what Moore made him out to have said. And Moore's only defense was that Heston said every word that Moore used.
In the same vein Micheal Moore has said,
"One thing you get used to when you're a snowman is to fantasize about Bush." and "I've enjoyed knowingly making up lies and repeating them over and over in the hopes that people will believe them. Look, I accept the fact that I'm a "crapweasel," and a "fat fucking piece of shit""
After all, Moore said every word right here. However i wouldn't accept putting the words together in that way to be good journalism anymore than i support what Moore did to Heston's speach, which ironicly ends "Our words and our behavior will be scrutinized more than ever this morning. Those who are hostile toward us will lie in wait to seize on a soundbite out of context."
There isn't a single word in F911 that hasn't been thoroughly researched and verified by a team of fact checkers.
Given your claim, it's interesting to note that "Joanne Doroshow, an associate producer of the film, says the sequence is "somewhat confusing, admittedly."" when speaking of the sequence that _seems_ to say that members of the bin Laden famil were flown out of the US after 9/11 while civilian flights were still grounded. (It's from this article about the movie.)
That's not as bad as what he did to Heston's speach, but it still seems disreputable and detracts from the things he says that are actually true.
Wait, they've got a deal for _more_ than one movie?? And this is not good news how? As long as every geek makes sure to go out and see each movie three or four times, we'll get a couple movies out of it and much higher odds of another tv series after the fact:)
No. They will not continue to record the series. The movie is all thats left, unfortunately. It was a terrific series.
You just provided a bare link to fireflyfans.net. I'm not seeing anything obvious on the front page saying they won't consider renewing the series, so your "proof" is somewhat dubious. Even if they specifically said somewhere that they had no plans to renew the series i would take it with a grain of salt. Of course they have no plans when there's currently no one offering to fund the series.
However occasionally evil marketing forces accomplish something good, look at the reinstatement of the Family Guy after all, which apparently a great number of people seem to think is a good thing (don't ask me why.) There's at least a small chance that lightning will strike twice, and i'll believe that Firefly is 100% dead when Whedon is made an offer by a studio to make a new Firefly series and he turns it down.
It's a great way to get free marketing for microsoft, and they can deny everything after the fact because they're not official press releases. Nintendo and Sony ought to get in on this game, just send lots of differing lists of specs to different people and let them all get leaked so everyone will get up in a frenzy about those consoles as well.
That's also entirely possible. However that screws with the "we're hurting Micorosft by buying their console" claim that so many people like to make.
If there's not enough geeks to affect anything, then clearly buying the concole is neither hurting nor helping Microsoft. However if there are enough to matter I would argue that the net benefit for Micorosft is greater than any financial harm they incur from console sales.
For this, MS has to convince third party developers that the machien has enough install base to make said games. So it's a catch 22. To get a higher install base, you must sell more units, to sell more units you must get the good games, to get the good games you have to have a large install base.....
Or they could just convince a bunch of geeks that they're somehow hurting Microsoft if they buy the console, then a lot of people will buy it and turn it into a linux box while Microsoft uses the sales numbers to justify devlopers getting onboard to make good games.
Oh, and would you mind using italics to quote instead of bold? It's kind of annoying.
Except it wasn't really a hydrocarbon issue. It was nationalism and teritorial issues between the US (and its allies) and China that caused everything to blow up:)
I just read it for the first time myself a few days ago, and was suprised about the whole coincidence of reading news stories about Cassini right after i started:)
It's amazing how many things he got right even if he was off in the details, the Columbia diaster, the election of a fundamentalist president with fascist leanings. Thankfully he missed out on Russia being able to help out the ISS with their Soyuz program and the whole X-Prize thing.
"My favorite is when they include six or seven links to various things and then include a quote from "the article" at the end, and you have no idea which link leads to the A you're supposed to be RTFing before you comment about it." (from here)
So which one of your six links leads to the quote? It seems like it's probabably not the first or the third. It doesn't seem to be the second. I especially liked the way the fourth link is camouflaged by putting it right up against the third link. I didn't even notice it was there thanks to a line break between the two until i happened to mouse over it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Study reveals flaws in ballots, voter errors may have cost Gore victory"
"If that standard had been adopted statewide, the study shows a slim, 42-vote margin for Gore."
"The consortium looked at what might have happened if a statewide recount had included these overvotes as well and found that Gore would have had a margin of fewer than 200 votes."
"Had many of these voters not marked a minor candidate in the second column, Gore would have netted thousands of additional votes as compared with Bush."
(Yeah, i'm being selective, but so were you.)
So who would have won would have depended on how the votes were counted. Too bad the Republicans had to get the US Supreme Court to interfere before the best method was determined and the recount was carried out to figure out who really got the most votes.
I will also make this simple, the only way survey data itself can be flawed is if there is a bias in the question, or a problem with the sampling. The results can be used to make bad decisions, but that's a problem with the analysis, not the survey itself. A survey that shows that 95% of the perisoners in the US think that prisoners should be paroled earlier instead of building new prisons to hold them is a perfectly valid survey. Using that survey to justify a decision to parole prisoners rather than building more prisons would be stupid.
The survey shows how many Japanese play online games and intend to in the future, it shows what the respondents think would convince them to play online games more. The survey concluds that in order to increase online game play _IN_JAPAN_ the things that the _JAPANESE_ respondants said they wanted should be done. That is a perfectly valid survey, and a perfectly valid conclusion to draw. How many Americans play online games and what they want has NO impact on how many Japanese play online games and what they want. A decision about whether the number of Japanese online gamers _needs_ to be increased or if a company should focus on Japan or America would benefit from a similar survey of American gamers. However for the use to which they are putting this survey it is completly valid.
The survey says _nothing_ about American gamers, or how Japense gamers compare to American gamers, nor was it intended to. Any such conclusions you or anyone else draw from it is completly your own imagining and not supported one way or ther other by the data in the survey.
The survey fails to factor in the already established obvious fact that online computer gaming is vastly less popular than single player and console gaming. Just this already makes their entire effort look silly, but despite that, the conclusions are misleading because they give connotations that this characteristic is purely Japanese in nature because their data is so highly limited and selective.
Yes, the survey _does_ factor that in. That's _why_ they asked the question about whether or not the respondants played online games. How else do you expect them to factor it in? It can't be an established _fact_ unless they either ask the question themself, or cite a previous survey or study that asks the exact same question. Your opinion that more people play console games than online does not make it a fact.
The survey says that most Japense gamers aren't interested in online games, that is true. 50% is much larger than 20%. It doesn't say whether or not they like them more or less than American gamers, and that really isn't important to what this survey is looking at, namely, how many _Japanese_ gamers play online games and what would convince more _Japanese_ gamers to try them?
The survey's conclusions telling us Japanese are less interested in online gaming than console gaming is like a survey telling us that most Americans in New York City speak English. We already knew that, and it's not just limited to New York City. All of America speaks English. So what is it trying to say in the first place?
If a survey was taken to determine what it would take to convince more people in New York to speak English, finding out how many of them already speak English would be a pretty important first question. Perhaps the people funding the survey think it would be important to promote English if 5% of the population doesn't speak it already, but not if only 1% doesn't. The fact that 15% of the people in California don't speak English is completly irrelevant to the survey, just as how many gamers in America play online games is irrelevant to people who are concerned with how to increase online gaming in _Japan_.
Even if the people making decisions based on a survey like this were to look at a similar survey in America, it is still important that the question
A survey works by polling a small number of people to statistically determine the nature of a much larger population. Any option which gets a significant number of responses (above the margin of error,) such as people who said they've played online games in this poll did, will mean that far more people in the full population fit this option than the survey covered. To claim that this means the data is flawed betrays a complete misunderstanding of how surveys work, or a complete failure of english to describe what you're talking about.
But pretty damn big for a MMORPG. FFXI has overtaken Everquest in subscriptions, becoming the most popular MMORPG currently in existence.
So? How well FF11 is doing compared to Everquest or any other online game has nothing to do with how popular online games are compared to single player games. This point is completly irrelevant.
This is all comes back to the fact that my understanding of surveys != flawed. Single player console games being vastly more popular than MMORPGs is an obvious fact. It has nothing to do with whether or not the Japanese like them more or less than multiplayer, it's a worldwide trend. Similar statistics can be taken in America. There are simply less people playing MMORPGs. That doesn't mean that "Japanese [are] not that interested in online videogaming." The survey presents overly selective and limited statistics to draw a conclusion that is misleading.
Apparently your complaint is about the CONCLUSIONS and not the DATA. You start off by saying that it's obvious that single player games are more popular than online games, which is _exactly_ what the DATA said, the data you claimed before was flawed. The survey does not present overly selective and limited statistics, it claims to show what gamers in Japan think of online gaming in general, and unless you can show a problem in their methodology it does exactly that.
However you claim that this doesn't mean that the Japanese don't like online gaming. Actually it shows pretty clearly that on average the Japanese don't like online gaming, but the point you're trying to make i think is that the Japanese don't necessarily like online gaming less than other groups, such as Americans. This might quite well be true, and if the survey had actually concluded that, you would be quite right in critisizing it.
The survey presents overly selective and limited statistics to draw a conclusion that is misleading.
The only conclusion i see is "The report concludes that while Japan's net infrastructure has improved greatly over the course of a year, work remains to be done on more useful payment systems and more interesting content." Which says nothing about how popular online games are compared to any other country, and makes no value judgements about the "popularity" of the games. All it says is that things have improved, but they could be improved even more (gain more players than they currently have) by changing certain aspects.
So it seems that you drew your own conclusions from the statistics, blamed the survey for that conclusion, and then tried to claim that the data was flawed even though it wan't the data you had the problem with originally.
Interestingly, i presume there is well over 1 million gamers in japan. In fact i'm very sure there are over 5 million since there are individual games that have sold that many copies in japan. Which means that if 20% have tried a premium online game, at least 1 million in the general population have done so. So if the subscription rate for FF11 is around a couple hundred thousand (does anyone have some current figures for this?) and more are playing FF11 than Everquest, what else have the all the rest of them been playing?
in which case it's entirely possible that the percentage who have played an online game have dropped. See, it's an easy mistake to make even if you know the difference if you're not watching your words carefully :)
And how many gamers are there total in Japan? Far _far_ more people than this survey covered. Your understanding of how surveys work == flawed.
And as for FF11, last i heard it was a few hundred thousand subscribers at most, which is pretty damn small for a Final Fantasy game. The franchise as a whole has sold about 50 million units, and the later titles were selling more than the early ones i'm pretty sure. Unfortunatly i can't remember where i saw a chart that breaks down sales by title.
Squarenix may be making tons of money from that comparitively small group of people because of the recuring subscription charges so it might by a huge financial success (or it might not, i don't know,) but as far as reaching a large percentage of the gamers in Japan goes FF11 is an abysmal failure.
They _don't_ say that the number of people has risen, they say the _percentage_ has risen. It entirely depends on how many people they asked. They might be more gamers to ask this year, in which case it's entirely possible that the number who have played an online game have dropped.
you need to leave your place and go outside more often.
Huh? I'm not sure what you're trying to imply. I get outside pleanty. Given some of the stories i've heard about Xbox Live, any mistaken assumptions i make about the average person on it being competent, civil and inteligent is probably based on spending TOO MUCH time outside and not enough time on Xbox Live (or any time for that matter.)
So if you meant to say that backwards, i do spend too much time outside with real people and friends to be able to make well informed judgements about the people on Xbox Live. I'm not sure if you meant me to feel insulted or what, but i'm just confused.
You need a unique key for a LOT more than that, that's just the most obvious purpose to the user.
As for easily looking people up, the first time i try to call someone i can't just tell the phone "Sarah Jones" and expect it to figure it out. I need to know a phone number. Once i know that number i can program it in (assuming i have a more modern phone at least) and just go by Sarah after that, because _i_ know who i mean when using my own personal phone list. There's no reason a Xbox Live friends list can't work the same way.
If they don't have it already, Xbox Live could even include brief profiles, so rather than saying "I'm the LeetKiller with ID 1023826141" you could just say "I'm the LeetKiller whose profile says I'm from LA, California."
Because, as quite clearly stated by me and others, using the gamertags as unique IDs leads to conflicts between people who want similar or the same names. The proposed solution was explicitly proposed as a solution to that propblem. Stating that if there are unique IDs it might as well be gamertags, as you keep asserting, completly ignores the proposed problem and just takes us back to square one.
As to why we're considering it a problem, why should person A have more right to a certain name just because they signed up X seconds before person B? Sure, it's cool to be the one and only person with your name, but that's not the way it works in real life, and it won't necessarily work that way online forever. It's too bad that if i try googling myself that multiple people show up, and it probably makes it harder for old friends to find me, but i don't think parents shouldn't be allowed to give future children my name anymore.
My _friends_ will know that i'm fragbastard and not frag_bastard. Friends can keep track of each other just fine, they don't confuse Josh Smith with Josh Jones. People who don't know either us well will get confused by fragbastard and frag_bastard, but what do i care about the people i don't know?
As long as i'm posting again however, I'll add Jude Fisher, another new author whose first book (fantasy) took me a little bit to get into but was strongly and amusingly reminiscent of Shakespeare when i did so. (Midsummer Nights Dream i think, or whichever one where everyone ends up romantically entagled with the wrong person.)
Also Paula Volsky, who does quasi-historical fantasy, and Michael Flynn and Stephen Baxter for SF. And just for completeness' sake, there's also Joan D. Vinge (Vernor Vinge's ex-wife, but a good author in her on right. I'm curious if they met because of their writing, or if one of them picked it up from the other after their marriage.)
Finding hard numbers on book sales and readership is difficult, however please explain the success of movies like Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, The Matrix, Shrek, X-Men, X-Men 2, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Terminator, Star Trek, i could go on, but you get the point.
I think the influence of SF and Fantasy is pretty darn clear, regardless of how many actual readers of the original material there are. If things like Shakespeare (incidentally, one of the most readable of the "classic" authors as well as the most relevant) are being justified because of the influence they've had on later literature and media, you can't then say that SF and Fantasy literature is irrelevant. Whether a movie based on a SF or Fantasy work is more or less culturally valuable than a movie based on a Shakespeare play is debatable (especially given some of the remakes of Shakespeare i've heard about) but there's no denying that they've both had an influence.
And of course those friends do the same thing with me, so i get clued in to some good books without having to do the work myself, and as soon as i finish there's immediatly someone waiting to discuss it with me.
I started reading at a pretty young age, and it probably has vastly increased my vocabulary. However it also vastly increased the number of words i know that i can read and understand but can't spell or pronounce correctly :)
If we move on into science fiction, there's S.M. Stirling, James Alan Gardner, Vernor Vinger, (who as just posted on slashdot, is coming out with a new book soon) Sheri S. Tepper (if you don't mind a strong feminist slant in your fiction) and Steven Barnes.
I'm sure there are more out there, quite possibly even on my bookshelves, but that's what i can remember at the moment.
Oh they have! that'll be the Gamertag.
Have you not been paying attention, or are you being intentionaly obtuse?
The problem is that they can not have two people using the same nick because the nick is currently the unique ID. Using unique ID numbers along with nicks, so as to allow people to choose whatever nick they want, does not "bring us back to unique names," because a unique ID has always been required from step one by the nature of the system. The only question is what the unique key should be.
And i hate to tell you this, but in the real world there are people with the _same_name_ who are in fact _different_people_. And we seem to deal with it okay. I may know several Sarahs, but i have no trouble telling them apart. If it ever comes up in conversation and there's the possibility of confusion i can say "Sarah X" or "Sarah who lives in Place_Y" and everyone deals just fine. I expect it would be the same way in XBox Live or any other online system. It seems unlikely that the average person would have too many people on their friends list with the same name. They'd just have to put in the unique ID once when they added them, and that would be that.
If you're confused because the only people who will play with you are frag_bastard, fragbastard, and fr4g|3astard, i expect that's more of a commentary on your personality rather than the feasability of the system.
For a pretty good example of this in his fiction, see Kiln People
Or are you just picking nits because you cannot find any actual factual errors in the movie?
First of all, it's not made clear that he's showing Heston at a seperate, later speach, and it seems quite likely he expected the audience to be confused by the editing technique. However what's really dishonest and wrong it's the part right _after_ that where he splices together three sentences that were originally scattered about a 13 paragraph speach, in order to make Heston sound as bad as possible.
Ethically that is completly abhorent to me. I agree with Moore's politics in both Bowling For Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, however that does not excuse lies and/or misrepresentations in order to convince people you're right. If you can't support it with the truth, don't support it at all.
Sure what Heston actually said isn't great, but it's a lot nicer and more reasonable than what Moore made him out to have said. And Moore's only defense was that Heston said every word that Moore used.
In the same vein Micheal Moore has said,
"One thing you get used to when you're a snowman is to fantasize about Bush." and "I've enjoyed knowingly making up lies and repeating them over and over in the hopes that people will believe them. Look, I accept the fact that I'm a "crapweasel," and a "fat fucking piece of shit""
After all, Moore said every word right here. However i wouldn't accept putting the words together in that way to be good journalism anymore than i support what Moore did to Heston's speach, which ironicly ends "Our words and our behavior will be scrutinized more than ever this morning. Those who are hostile toward us will lie in wait to seize on a soundbite out of context."
There isn't a single word in F911 that hasn't been thoroughly researched and verified by a team of fact checkers.
Given your claim, it's interesting to note that "Joanne Doroshow, an associate producer of the film, says the sequence is "somewhat confusing, admittedly."" when speaking of the sequence that _seems_ to say that members of the bin Laden famil were flown out of the US after 9/11 while civilian flights were still grounded. (It's from this article about the movie.)
That's not as bad as what he did to Heston's speach, but it still seems disreputable and detracts from the things he says that are actually true.
Oh, and here's the comparison of what Moore put in the film and what Heston actually said, and it even included a mid-sentence cut which i'd forgotten about, which makes the words i put in Moore's mouth even more appropriate.
And let's hope that even if they leave it turn-based that they don't "fix it" the way Master of Orion 3 got "fixed."
Wait, they've got a deal for _more_ than one movie?? And this is not good news how? As long as every geek makes sure to go out and see each movie three or four times, we'll get a couple movies out of it and much higher odds of another tv series after the fact :)
You just provided a bare link to fireflyfans.net. I'm not seeing anything obvious on the front page saying they won't consider renewing the series, so your "proof" is somewhat dubious. Even if they specifically said somewhere that they had no plans to renew the series i would take it with a grain of salt. Of course they have no plans when there's currently no one offering to fund the series.
However occasionally evil marketing forces accomplish something good, look at the reinstatement of the Family Guy after all, which apparently a great number of people seem to think is a good thing (don't ask me why.) There's at least a small chance that lightning will strike twice, and i'll believe that Firefly is 100% dead when Whedon is made an offer by a studio to make a new Firefly series and he turns it down.
It's a great way to get free marketing for microsoft, and they can deny everything after the fact because they're not official press releases. Nintendo and Sony ought to get in on this game, just send lots of differing lists of specs to different people and let them all get leaked so everyone will get up in a frenzy about those consoles as well.
That's also entirely possible. However that screws with the "we're hurting Micorosft by buying their console" claim that so many people like to make.
If there's not enough geeks to affect anything, then clearly buying the concole is neither hurting nor helping Microsoft. However if there are enough to matter I would argue that the net benefit for Micorosft is greater than any financial harm they incur from console sales.
Or they could just convince a bunch of geeks that they're somehow hurting Microsoft if they buy the console, then a lot of people will buy it and turn it into a linux box while Microsoft uses the sales numbers to justify devlopers getting onboard to make good games.
Oh, and would you mind using italics to quote instead of bold? It's kind of annoying.
I just read it for the first time myself a few days ago, and was suprised about the whole coincidence of reading news stories about Cassini right after i started :)
It's amazing how many things he got right even if he was off in the details, the Columbia diaster, the election of a fundamentalist president with fascist leanings. Thankfully he missed out on Russia being able to help out the ISS with their Soyuz program and the whole X-Prize thing.
"My favorite is when they include six or seven links to various things and then include a quote from "the article" at the end, and you have no idea which link leads to the A you're supposed to be RTFing before you comment about it." (from here)
So which one of your six links leads to the quote? It seems like it's probabably not the first or the third. It doesn't seem to be the second. I especially liked the way the fourth link is camouflaged by putting it right up against the third link. I didn't even notice it was there thanks to a line break between the two until i happened to mouse over it.
Real Grade A job of obfuscation!