Happily, when they can actually release a dub with quality voice actors - as in, sometime around never.
Voice acting for big releases in Japan pays well and is a huge business - think of the star quality you get in a Disney movie.
Dubs of anime films are usually done by studios specializing in bringing as many anime films over as possible as cheap as possible, and use voice acting roughly on par with cheap children's programs.
It's like watching Star Wars with Sir Alec Guinness's award winning voice replaced by some guy just out of community college theatre, who is also doing the voice of Leia using a bad falsetto.
Combine that with the consistent problem of bad obnoxious translations ("Believe it!") and the core, unavoidable issue that different languages have entirely different pacings to them (ie, trying to fit the whole english translation of a sentence into the same amount of time as the japanese sounds ridiculously forced and unnatural) and you can see why quite a few people would really prefer subtitles. With a little practice you can read it fast enough to go watch the screen at the same time. I've noticed it's only people who have only watched one or two subbed movies in their life who seem to have problems keeping up with it -- but most of them pick it up fairly well by the end of a series.
Physics processing in a particle system is one of those embarrassingly parallel problems. Generally you are throwing large numbers of points into a system with a set number of influences (gravity, wind, attraction to a point) and simulating where they should be without considering collision detection or how they influence each other.
The moment you have to do collision detection or more detailed constraints, you have a lot more dependencies to work with. Although you can still massage the data into more parallel forms and do a sort of hybrid approach, it requires a lot more work get the same sort of speed increase. Particle systems have been done on GPU's for a while now, actually - you just had to jump through some weird hoops for it.
Still, I think most of what was being advertised in Ageia and similar offerings was the additional particles you can throw at a scene. You can make an explosion of a building look much cooler if it *actually* sends of hundreds or thousands of different mortar fragments flying into the air than if you try to fake it with just a few.
You can even do some basic collision detection on the particles (like, say, making them bounce off the ground) as long as they don't have to all interact with each other.
It's going to be like adding texturing and lighting support to the GPU was - nothing revolutionary in terms of what you can do in the game, but significantly improving the eye candy factor.
I think it has a lot to do with the operating system. Almost all of the windows users I know just hit "maximize" for all of their web pages, and now have an absurdly wide web page, making them prefer a 4:3. The mac or linux users run two windows side by side and prefer the widescreen.
Not trying to make a judgment call about which is better, but I do think that the interface you use significantly affects the style of screen you'd want as well as how much you end up gaining from a larger display.
Just add a daily quest from some shady merchant NPC to go pick up his new catalogue - of real life ads.
If you never want to do the quest, no problem, but there's a motivation of being paid in game money to do it.
Just make sure they're things that actually belong in the game world. "Ye Olde Spice" would probably be pushing it, but it would at least be better than seeing a giant microsoft banner next to the battle standards in thrall's throne room.
Now if only they could make their XP drivers suck less.
They may be more stable to the user, but in terms of actually programming for them.. yikes. You look at them funny and you lose your whole opengl context or start running a 1 frame/hour. Nvidia's drivers are much more likely to either a) work or b) tell you why they didn't.
Oh, I'm not surprised the rest of the world hates the US.
I'm just saying that every country who is in a position to force agreements to their advantage, does. Canada is stuck hoping that people are fair because they're usually the little guy trading with the big guy - you get stuck playing with the big guy's rules.
It sucks, but it's the way things are, and don't think for a minute it wouldn't be reversed if Canada were the more powerful trading partner. It's not "The US is Evil," it's "Everyone's Evil, but the US is Evil *and* powerful."
Is there any government for whom this isn't true? Most theories of nations and international politics indicate that national leaders move largely according to what they can get away with. Anyone expecting different is projecting quite a bit of idealism onto a process that really isn't.
Obviously your problem is that you need a better desk chair:) I'm always amazed at how much people skimp on the things that they have to interact with all day (chair, desk, monitor, keyboard, mouse) while being perfectly willing to pay to make their computer go 5% faster.
With PCs, I think a lot of the problem is the mindset of always having the biggest and baddest video card to be able to run everything. Here's the trick - you really don't.
I buy either last gen's top of the line product, or this gen's middle of the road product (whichever gives better price/performance) which ends up costing me maybe $150-200 more than tossing my old (and possibly dying at this point) video card from my last system in. Less than a console, and it will always play any game on the market for that year and probably another year afterward at high resolution and detail settings (because it's all the hardware the game developers had when they were making the games at that point - no game but Crysis tries to target GPU's that haven't been made yet, it kind of cuts into marketshare). Moreover, it will definitely continue to play almost all new games at close to high res, or at worst, normal settings, and will at least still look equivalent to consoles unless the consoles *just* came out.
So at two of those per console generation, you're actually about even in purchase price with your console, and you get all of the benefits (and woes - personally I like MMO's and mouse and keyboard FPSes, so that outweighs the negatives) of PC gaming.
I'm just saying that the argument about being significantly more expensive than a console is bull if you are already planning on buying a decent PC every 2-3 years - the upgrade to a gaming PC doesn't require a $600 quad-core GTSX9 million.
And there should be a legal difference between a societal taboo, and a societal taboo that is based on a person's religion? Not saying that we should or shouldn't censor either of them, but it's the same thing - some subset of a society considers it inappropriate to show something.
Which is, btw, why US profanity laws tend to be local, and be based entirely on "what an average person of the community would find offensive."
This is the real consequences of the "wardrobe malfunction" bullshit. Everyone complained about how small the fines were for such a large corporation, so the FCC upped them - for everyone. Now every small independent radio station is terrified to run anything remotely edgy, because one fine is more than their yearly budget. It's a real mess.
I think I'm not even really opposed to the idea of welfare, in theory, I just don't see the government ever coming up with a way to do it that doesn't just balloon spending and produce a dependent mindset among the poor. My mom works in an inner city school, and she sees a lot of kids on free lunch and welfare with a big screen TV and fancy new tennis shoes. There's a real problem with the mindset that keeps people poor instead of just working class. I can't prove that welfare causes it.. but it doesn't seem as though any current implementation we have is helping the root problem, it's just throwing bandaids at people, and I don't really expect that throwing more money at it is going to help.
So welfare/healthcare reform, sure, although I'll remain skeptical than anything better is going to come out of it. Keep what we have and toss on the government paying for your medical bills? Not a big fan.
Government's purpose is to give people a safe system of laws in which they can attempt to make their fortune and live as they will. It's not their mommy, it's not their daddy. "safe from abject poverty"? How did you get there in the first place? Go get a job, learn a trade, do something. If you get to a point in your life where you can't take care of yourself and your family and children and friends are not willing to take care of you such that you have to start asking the government to do it, I think you failed in your life.
I don't think people are entitled to medical treatments costing tens of thousands of dollars to help them survive, or all the newest possible drugs to keep them happy. Everyone dies eventually. Basic emergency care is something everyone should get, and everyone *does* get no matter what - emergency rooms won't turn you away if you have a broken leg and can't pay.
Now, I think there's an entirely reasonable argument that our healthcare system makes things more expensive and inefficient than they should be, but I don't think government assisted health insurance is really the way to fix any of that efficiency.
What sort of rising challenge are you referring to? Terrorists don't have subs and even if they did, our current subs are more than adequate for the time being. We don't need new subs to defend our country. A new sub is only useful for going on the offense against another country that has naval power. All potentially dangerous countries with naval power are countries that we can simply nuke if it really comes down to defending our country. Sometimes we have to go without the latest toys when the economy turns down.
China, a revitalized Russia. Heck, even India in twenty years.
I'm all in favor of reducing government spending, including military spending. I just consider the military to be a more valid expenditure than many of our social programs.
laugh* I was referring to remotely piloted aircraft, not automated aircraft.
Remotely piloted aircraft are an impossibility until we find some way to replace Radio as a means of communication. The lag time to a remote UAV is such that it has to largely fly itself, and take only high-level decisions from an operator. I'm actually involved in a project for a trainer for those users. The problem is that the lag between the decision to fire and the machine actually getting the signal is high enough to lose an air to air battle. We're quite a ways off from being able to replace fighters, and even if we sat still on the now 30 year old F-15, Russia and China aren't.
Not saying we need a full-fledged arms race, but we do need to keep our tech at least reasonably currently.
Did I say no help whatsoever? Public schools draw the vast majority of their of their funding from state and local governments, not federal. Same for roads other than interstates. And yes, the family did support grandma and grandpa, although you can't do much about accepting social security since you were, in fact, forced to pay into it your whole life.
But you do make a good point that no one lives without help from the government in some fashion. I would hope we get something from all the money we send them:)
There's a line drawn somewhere between what constitutes a public good and is reasonable for government to provide, and what is more something that should be required of people to do on their own. I think we've stepped the line farther toward government help than we should have. That doesn't mean that I think we should do away with it all together (although I would prefer to see more of it done at the state level than national).
I feel there is a difference between publicly funded education and welfare, because both of those enable someone to better themselves and become more productive economically and socially, and education at least requires a real investment from them to be useful. And even then, I worry about our dependence on it and the quality of our public school graduates. Welfare, on the other hand, just helps someone subsist in a low state instead of allowing market forces to push them into either getting a better job or spending less.
Well, except for those million dollar subs are largely being spent on American companies:) The military industrial complex consumes quite a bit of money, but so does the cosmetics industry. The point is that that "pork," while possibly wasteful for the country as a whole, is going to largely American jobs.
As for the infantry money... while I don't deny that our infantry deserve more funding, I take issue with your basic principal that we shouldn't be spending money on high tech equipment.
They haven't mattered in any of the wars we've fought recently because none of the wars we've fought recently have mattered.
I don't mean that as an attack on our soldiers, or on the military as a whole - but recent wars have been wars of politics and global influence. They have had nothing whatsoever to do with our continued personal or economic survival as a nation.
By that same logic, no one needed to invent tanks and machine guns for world war I, because you can conquer the African natives with black powder rifles just fine.
Invading and/or defending third world countries and hunting down terrorists does not take advanced subs. Keeping our status as a superpower versus the next rising power to challenge us does. Guess which one of those is going to affect our national security and economy more.
Not saying we shouldn't cut back military spending at all (I think the JSF is a great idea for example), but we have to be careful about paper savings - the stealth bombers, for example, are only as expensive as quoted because the R&D budget got amortized over a dozen planes instead of over 60, in an effort to make "budget cuts" on a project whose real cost was research.
And finally - as much as robot technology has advanced, we are nowhere near having a UAV that is anything close to replacing an F-22 with a good pilot in versatility or performance, even if they can take higher G's. Not to mention the fact that I don't like the idea of completely robotic control systems for combat craft (not because of some doomsday "it becomes self aware" bs, but because I've worked on control routines for robotics, and there are plenty of dangerous emergent behaviors short of sentience).
If you actually go read the site, many of the comments I've found have actually been quite supportive. Some were even along the lines of "Officer so-and-so was being a jerk, but Officer Do-Good showed up and was much more reasonable. I still got a ticket, but he was nice about it."
And the most hit pages usually have to do with a specific incident - such as one example I read of a group of motorcycle hobbyists who were ticketed en masse by an officer who claimed he could "hear them speeding" while they claim to have been stuck in 5mph traffic. That sort of thing deserves a public forum for both sides to give their story - which is all this website appears to be.
I think the basic difference of opinion is that I consider the military a valid expenditure and part of the correct habits of our national government - whereas I don't think that healthcare and retirement plans are.
I know this makes me a horrible, old-fashioned, poor-person hater in the eyes of liberal European government.
I maintain that the only reason that Western Europe in general can afford so many government programs is that in the last fifty years our military budget has been paying for a large part of their safekeeping. Military requirements can grow and shrink, but they never go away, and as bad of a hegemon as the US can be at times, most people would consider the Soviet Union or China to be worse. We're in a rare lull with a single super power here - it's not going to last.
And finally - I don't believe that government handouts are the way to help poor people. My family background is poor, dirt farmer poor - but they never took farm subsidies because that meant that the government had control over your land. In just one generation after that their children were solidly middle class, and now my generation is all college educated with good jobs. The government lifting people up isn't the answer - giving people opportunities to lift themselves up is. That means stop worrying about healthcare for unemployed people and try to fix why those people don't have jobs in the first place.
I think that the veto override system would theoretically work - except for the fact that the President's party in congress lately almost always goes along with him. It makes it very hard to get a 2/3 vote when congress is still as evenly as it is now.
I've been very disappointed with elected republicans ignoring their responsibility as congressmen to actually do their job as a balance to the president instead of just cheerleading him on - just because he's from the same party doesn't mean you should give up all your power to him.
Btw - that's actually why I'm a little worried about electing a democrat president this election - the democrats are in a very good strategic position in the house and senate this year, and will likely maintain their lead in the house and create one in the senate. Which removes the separation of powers again next year if we don't elect a republican president, and suddenly instead of rubber-stamping terror bills and invasions we're rubber stamping a whole new level of welfare state.
The only way powers are separated in the current system is by party lines.
It's the end result of the rush to the bottom nature of the big PC manufacturers. They don't think they can market a machine with a low-end graphics card as being worth $20-50 more than one without it, despite the greater than 10x jump in performance. And that's because no one has been telling consumers that they need to look for it.
It's really a darn shame, especially for those of us who love PC games and want to be developing them.
I agree 100%. The difference between an integrated graphics chip and a $50 consumer-grade card from *two* generations ago is staggering.
A Geforce 6600 will still run new Unreal Engine games with the graphics turned down to medium. A 5900 will run them on low (I think, anyway.. they might be missing a few extensions needed). That's hardware from several years ago.
An intel integrated graphics card still can't run Quake 3 well.
He's saying we need to get into that 10x range from low to high, not that everyone needs an 8800. When the average new product gets trounced by a low-end standalone card from four years ago... how are you supposed to develop games for the platform?
Slashdot Mirror
Happily, when they can actually release a dub with quality voice actors - as in, sometime around never.
Voice acting for big releases in Japan pays well and is a huge business - think of the star quality you get in a Disney movie.
Dubs of anime films are usually done by studios specializing in bringing as many anime films over as possible as cheap as possible, and use voice acting roughly on par with cheap children's programs.
It's like watching Star Wars with Sir Alec Guinness's award winning voice replaced by some guy just out of community college theatre, who is also doing the voice of Leia using a bad falsetto.
Combine that with the consistent problem of bad obnoxious translations ("Believe it!") and the core, unavoidable issue that different languages have entirely different pacings to them (ie, trying to fit the whole english translation of a sentence into the same amount of time as the japanese sounds ridiculously forced and unnatural) and you can see why quite a few people would really prefer subtitles. With a little practice you can read it fast enough to go watch the screen at the same time. I've noticed it's only people who have only watched one or two subbed movies in their life who seem to have problems keeping up with it -- but most of them pick it up fairly well by the end of a series.
While I agree 100%, I know a number of windows users whose number 1 consistent complaint about macs is that maximize doesn't work "properly" ;-)
Physics processing in a particle system is one of those embarrassingly parallel problems. Generally you are throwing large numbers of points into a system with a set number of influences (gravity, wind, attraction to a point) and simulating where they should be without considering collision detection or how they influence each other.
The moment you have to do collision detection or more detailed constraints, you have a lot more dependencies to work with. Although you can still massage the data into more parallel forms and do a sort of hybrid approach, it requires a lot more work get the same sort of speed increase. Particle systems have been done on GPU's for a while now, actually - you just had to jump through some weird hoops for it.
Still, I think most of what was being advertised in Ageia and similar offerings was the additional particles you can throw at a scene. You can make an explosion of a building look much cooler if it *actually* sends of hundreds or thousands of different mortar fragments flying into the air than if you try to fake it with just a few.
You can even do some basic collision detection on the particles (like, say, making them bounce off the ground) as long as they don't have to all interact with each other.
It's going to be like adding texturing and lighting support to the GPU was - nothing revolutionary in terms of what you can do in the game, but significantly improving the eye candy factor.
I think it has a lot to do with the operating system. Almost all of the windows users I know just hit "maximize" for all of their web pages, and now have an absurdly wide web page, making them prefer a 4:3. The mac or linux users run two windows side by side and prefer the widescreen.
Not trying to make a judgment call about which is better, but I do think that the interface you use significantly affects the style of screen you'd want as well as how much you end up gaining from a larger display.
Someone who got a scholarship and works summers/during school? I'd assume that someone this resourceful isn't flipping burgers, either.
Just add a daily quest from some shady merchant NPC to go pick up his new catalogue - of real life ads.
If you never want to do the quest, no problem, but there's a motivation of being paid in game money to do it.
Just make sure they're things that actually belong in the game world. "Ye Olde Spice" would probably be pushing it, but it would at least be better than seeing a giant microsoft banner next to the battle standards in thrall's throne room.
Now if only they could make their XP drivers suck less.
They may be more stable to the user, but in terms of actually programming for them.. yikes. You look at them funny and you lose your whole opengl context or start running a 1 frame/hour. Nvidia's drivers are much more likely to either a) work or b) tell you why they didn't.
Oh, I'm not surprised the rest of the world hates the US.
I'm just saying that every country who is in a position to force agreements to their advantage, does. Canada is stuck hoping that people are fair because they're usually the little guy trading with the big guy - you get stuck playing with the big guy's rules.
It sucks, but it's the way things are, and don't think for a minute it wouldn't be reversed if Canada were the more powerful trading partner. It's not "The US is Evil," it's "Everyone's Evil, but the US is Evil *and* powerful."
Is there any government for whom this isn't true? Most theories of nations and international politics indicate that national leaders move largely according to what they can get away with. Anyone expecting different is projecting quite a bit of idealism onto a process that really isn't.
Obviously your problem is that you need a better desk chair :) I'm always amazed at how much people skimp on the things that they have to interact with all day (chair, desk, monitor, keyboard, mouse) while being perfectly willing to pay to make their computer go 5% faster.
With PCs, I think a lot of the problem is the mindset of always having the biggest and baddest video card to be able to run everything. Here's the trick - you really don't.
I buy either last gen's top of the line product, or this gen's middle of the road product (whichever gives better price/performance) which ends up costing me maybe $150-200 more than tossing my old (and possibly dying at this point) video card from my last system in. Less than a console, and it will always play any game on the market for that year and probably another year afterward at high resolution and detail settings (because it's all the hardware the game developers had when they were making the games at that point - no game but Crysis tries to target GPU's that haven't been made yet, it kind of cuts into marketshare). Moreover, it will definitely continue to play almost all new games at close to high res, or at worst, normal settings, and will at least still look equivalent to consoles unless the consoles *just* came out.
So at two of those per console generation, you're actually about even in purchase price with your console, and you get all of the benefits (and woes - personally I like MMO's and mouse and keyboard FPSes, so that outweighs the negatives) of PC gaming.
I'm just saying that the argument about being significantly more expensive than a console is bull if you are already planning on buying a decent PC every 2-3 years - the upgrade to a gaming PC doesn't require a $600 quad-core GTSX9 million.
Yes. That's what happens when there's a monopoly on an industry.
And there should be a legal difference between a societal taboo, and a societal taboo that is based on a person's religion? Not saying that we should or shouldn't censor either of them, but it's the same thing - some subset of a society considers it inappropriate to show something.
Which is, btw, why US profanity laws tend to be local, and be based entirely on "what an average person of the community would find offensive."
This is the real consequences of the "wardrobe malfunction" bullshit. Everyone complained about how small the fines were for such a large corporation, so the FCC upped them - for everyone. Now every small independent radio station is terrified to run anything remotely edgy, because one fine is more than their yearly budget. It's a real mess.
I think I'm not even really opposed to the idea of welfare, in theory, I just don't see the government ever coming up with a way to do it that doesn't just balloon spending and produce a dependent mindset among the poor. My mom works in an inner city school, and she sees a lot of kids on free lunch and welfare with a big screen TV and fancy new tennis shoes. There's a real problem with the mindset that keeps people poor instead of just working class. I can't prove that welfare causes it.. but it doesn't seem as though any current implementation we have is helping the root problem, it's just throwing bandaids at people, and I don't really expect that throwing more money at it is going to help.
So welfare/healthcare reform, sure, although I'll remain skeptical than anything better is going to come out of it. Keep what we have and toss on the government paying for your medical bills? Not a big fan.
Government's purpose is to give people a safe system of laws in which they can attempt to make their fortune and live as they will. It's not their mommy, it's not their daddy. "safe from abject poverty"? How did you get there in the first place? Go get a job, learn a trade, do something. If you get to a point in your life where you can't take care of yourself and your family and children and friends are not willing to take care of you such that you have to start asking the government to do it, I think you failed in your life.
I don't think people are entitled to medical treatments costing tens of thousands of dollars to help them survive, or all the newest possible drugs to keep them happy. Everyone dies eventually. Basic emergency care is something everyone should get, and everyone *does* get no matter what - emergency rooms won't turn you away if you have a broken leg and can't pay.
Now, I think there's an entirely reasonable argument that our healthcare system makes things more expensive and inefficient than they should be, but I don't think government assisted health insurance is really the way to fix any of that efficiency.
China, a revitalized Russia. Heck, even India in twenty years.
I'm all in favor of reducing government spending, including military spending. I just consider the military to be a more valid expenditure than many of our social programs.
Remotely piloted aircraft are an impossibility until we find some way to replace Radio as a means of communication. The lag time to a remote UAV is such that it has to largely fly itself, and take only high-level decisions from an operator. I'm actually involved in a project for a trainer for those users. The problem is that the lag between the decision to fire and the machine actually getting the signal is high enough to lose an air to air battle. We're quite a ways off from being able to replace fighters, and even if we sat still on the now 30 year old F-15, Russia and China aren't.
Not saying we need a full-fledged arms race, but we do need to keep our tech at least reasonably currently.
Did I say no help whatsoever? Public schools draw the vast majority of their of their funding from state and local governments, not federal. Same for roads other than interstates. And yes, the family did support grandma and grandpa, although you can't do much about accepting social security since you were, in fact, forced to pay into it your whole life.
:)
But you do make a good point that no one lives without help from the government in some fashion. I would hope we get something from all the money we send them
There's a line drawn somewhere between what constitutes a public good and is reasonable for government to provide, and what is more something that should be required of people to do on their own. I think we've stepped the line farther toward government help than we should have. That doesn't mean that I think we should do away with it all together (although I would prefer to see more of it done at the state level than national).
I feel there is a difference between publicly funded education and welfare, because both of those enable someone to better themselves and become more productive economically and socially, and education at least requires a real investment from them to be useful. And even then, I worry about our dependence on it and the quality of our public school graduates. Welfare, on the other hand, just helps someone subsist in a low state instead of allowing market forces to push them into either getting a better job or spending less.
Well, except for those million dollar subs are largely being spent on American companies :) The military industrial complex consumes quite a bit of money, but so does the cosmetics industry. The point is that that "pork," while possibly wasteful for the country as a whole, is going to largely American jobs.
As for the infantry money... while I don't deny that our infantry deserve more funding, I take issue with your basic principal that we shouldn't be spending money on high tech equipment.
They haven't mattered in any of the wars we've fought recently because none of the wars we've fought recently have mattered.
I don't mean that as an attack on our soldiers, or on the military as a whole - but recent wars have been wars of politics and global influence. They have had nothing whatsoever to do with our continued personal or economic survival as a nation.
By that same logic, no one needed to invent tanks and machine guns for world war I, because you can conquer the African natives with black powder rifles just fine.
Invading and/or defending third world countries and hunting down terrorists does not take advanced subs. Keeping our status as a superpower versus the next rising power to challenge us does. Guess which one of those is going to affect our national security and economy more.
Not saying we shouldn't cut back military spending at all (I think the JSF is a great idea for example), but we have to be careful about paper savings - the stealth bombers, for example, are only as expensive as quoted because the R&D budget got amortized over a dozen planes instead of over 60, in an effort to make "budget cuts" on a project whose real cost was research.
And finally - as much as robot technology has advanced, we are nowhere near having a UAV that is anything close to replacing an F-22 with a good pilot in versatility or performance, even if they can take higher G's. Not to mention the fact that I don't like the idea of completely robotic control systems for combat craft (not because of some doomsday "it becomes self aware" bs, but because I've worked on control routines for robotics, and there are plenty of dangerous emergent behaviors short of sentience).
If you actually go read the site, many of the comments I've found have actually been quite supportive. Some were even along the lines of "Officer so-and-so was being a jerk, but Officer Do-Good showed up and was much more reasonable. I still got a ticket, but he was nice about it."
And the most hit pages usually have to do with a specific incident - such as one example I read of a group of motorcycle hobbyists who were ticketed en masse by an officer who claimed he could "hear them speeding" while they claim to have been stuck in 5mph traffic. That sort of thing deserves a public forum for both sides to give their story - which is all this website appears to be.
I think the basic difference of opinion is that I consider the military a valid expenditure and part of the correct habits of our national government - whereas I don't think that healthcare and retirement plans are.
I know this makes me a horrible, old-fashioned, poor-person hater in the eyes of liberal European government.
I maintain that the only reason that Western Europe in general can afford so many government programs is that in the last fifty years our military budget has been paying for a large part of their safekeeping. Military requirements can grow and shrink, but they never go away, and as bad of a hegemon as the US can be at times, most people would consider the Soviet Union or China to be worse. We're in a rare lull with a single super power here - it's not going to last.
And finally - I don't believe that government handouts are the way to help poor people. My family background is poor, dirt farmer poor - but they never took farm subsidies because that meant that the government had control over your land. In just one generation after that their children were solidly middle class, and now my generation is all college educated with good jobs. The government lifting people up isn't the answer - giving people opportunities to lift themselves up is. That means stop worrying about healthcare for unemployed people and try to fix why those people don't have jobs in the first place.
I think that the veto override system would theoretically work - except for the fact that the President's party in congress lately almost always goes along with him. It makes it very hard to get a 2/3 vote when congress is still as evenly as it is now.
I've been very disappointed with elected republicans ignoring their responsibility as congressmen to actually do their job as a balance to the president instead of just cheerleading him on - just because he's from the same party doesn't mean you should give up all your power to him.
Btw - that's actually why I'm a little worried about electing a democrat president this election - the democrats are in a very good strategic position in the house and senate this year, and will likely maintain their lead in the house and create one in the senate. Which removes the separation of powers again next year if we don't elect a republican president, and suddenly instead of rubber-stamping terror bills and invasions we're rubber stamping a whole new level of welfare state.
The only way powers are separated in the current system is by party lines.
Somehow I don't remember my parents ever caving in.
With me, they managed to reason with me.
With my sister, they told her no often enough that she stopped trying. Eventually.
It's the end result of the rush to the bottom nature of the big PC manufacturers. They don't think they can market a machine with a low-end graphics card as being worth $20-50 more than one without it, despite the greater than 10x jump in performance. And that's because no one has been telling consumers that they need to look for it.
It's really a darn shame, especially for those of us who love PC games and want to be developing them.
I agree 100%. The difference between an integrated graphics chip and a $50 consumer-grade card from *two* generations ago is staggering.
A Geforce 6600 will still run new Unreal Engine games with the graphics turned down to medium. A 5900 will run them on low (I think, anyway.. they might be missing a few extensions needed). That's hardware from several years ago.
An intel integrated graphics card still can't run Quake 3 well.
He's saying we need to get into that 10x range from low to high, not that everyone needs an 8800. When the average new product gets trounced by a low-end standalone card from four years ago... how are you supposed to develop games for the platform?
Hence the success of World of Warcraft.