The US is not starting this race, but it'd be nice to keep up regardless.
From your SpaceDaily.com link above: "China will become the third nation after U.S. and Russia to possess an ASAT system." China can make arguments identical to yours about enlightened self-interest. They could make the same argument about WMDs -- and Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, and the regime in Iran have all done just that. Deterrence, etc.
Humboldt squid were fished pretty heavily off California this winter. I have a Google news thing set up to tell me anything new with "giant squid" in the text, and lots of stories about fishing trips showed up. Seems like they're gone for the season now, though.
They're very aggressive, your diver is right. A comparable species (supposedly) that's on the scale of architeuthis is the "colossal" squid. Very active, hooks on the suckers, and in other ways a little closer to Humboldts. There's a nice little diagram on that BBC page showing the scale next to an old double-decker London bus.
Did anyone else expect (hope?) that this was an underwater camera disguised as a giant squid? It would be great for capturing those evil giant-squid hunters in the act.
You know, that's not a bad idea. So far we've got footage of the one living, active giant squid ever, and it was caught on a (suitably huge) bait line. We also have never seen Sperm whales actually hunting on their long dives; a National Geographic "Search for the Giant Squid" special a few years ago attached some cameras to the whales and followed them down a while, but the Physeters were swimming in such close formation that they knocked the cameras off each other. Even the close group of whales was news to science, actually. Nobody really knows if, as is speculated, the Sperm whale's nose is actually part of a sonic weapon used to incapacitate its prey at depth. This is the largest predator (aside from "preying" on krill) that we've ever found in the world, and we know jack about it even though we've killed loads of them.
But let's run a camera disguised as Architeuthis down into something like the Kaikoura trench and see if we can't get footage of those whales coming in for a kill, shall we?
Well look at Microsoft's current campaign, they aren't criticizing their competitors, they are criticising you. You're a dinosaur.
The wrongheadedness of that MS campaign is spectacular, isn't it? You can tell what they were thinking; basically the idea was to goad us into paying for upgrades to systems and app suites for which people aren't ponying up their upgrade fees. MS needs businesses, especially, to stay on that treadmill.
Talk about insulting their audience, though. That campaign is almost up there with the RIAA folks and their "our consumers are thieves" mindset. MS even does the RIAA one better -- because the point is that we're dinosaurs who are using Microsoft's old products. They trash us, and they trash their own software!
The diary entries on "Doogie Howser, MD" and Carrie's "Sex and the City" word processor were about par for the course when it comes to computers in the pop media. Both shows posited worlds where computers were for t-y-p-i-n-g v-e-e-e-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, in fonts that took up maybe 1/10 of the screen per line, so that the viewer could watch the appear over the character's shoulder. (Both shows also featured characters whose grand observations about life were invariably a single short sentence's worth of trite aphorism, or a simple question.)
As a narrative device it's lame, okay, but frankly I'll take that over the postmodern delayed deus ex machine of the geek's solution to a technical problem: Oooh, our brainwizard has been working away steadily at a problem all plot long, and now that we're ten minutes shy of the ending, she's finally broken through the security system/discovered the answer to the riddle/broken the code. The writers may as well have Geordi adjust the trust old modulation on the phase transponder, it's the same plot device.
Lately we're up to the level found in the funnies (other than FoxTrot): names get dropped. Ooh, she "googled" that term! That's about how far we've gotten with the Web in movies and TV... and the brain dead comic strip "B.C." for that matter.
Are these fellas so stunted that they have no real female "friends" and family that they would be outraged if this happened to, have they no empathy of what a traumatizing violation this would be?
We both know the answer to your rhetorical question... Though some of them are 43-year-old fathers of three with profoundly disturbing internal lives, I suspect.
Hey, though, it's not just Slashdot. Salon's new letters section gets a handful of truly persistent trolls. Take a look in the "Broadsheet" area for anything posted by "BrightStar65" sometime. Yesterday in response to the story of a high school "top 25" list of girls (including detailed [vulgar] physical descriptions), BrightStar told us the girls were partly at fault for judging themselves in ways to do with their appearances. That's in the avowedly feminist area of a liberal site.
There's something about the anonymity of Web "handles" that brings out skeeviness. Our local paper requires actual names on its bulletin boards, and you get the political flames but nothing quite like Slashdot's "geeks are boys" feel.
There's something to be said for en(t)ertainment value, for (C)hrist's sake. It doesn't have to be 100% accurate, or even 5%. It does, however, need to read at a good pace and keep your interest.
For my money, Umberto Eco is about 800 times the writer Dan Brown or Arturo Perez-Reverte is. I've read "Name of the Rose" maybe six times over the years. It's deeply satisfying. Brown's just a Michael Crichton-level pop writer. He's disposable.
And boy, did I enjoy Alec Guinness in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" more than any James Bond movie ever. For entertainment, for any quality you care to name. That's a low-budget BBC miniseries against some of the priciest Hollywood products around, and it's clear which one's more entertaining for me.
It's great you want to be entertained. It's great that kids read Harry Potter, which is pretty poorly written (and in the last three books, execrably edited). We don't have to choose between entertaining and intelligent, though. It's not that sad a world.
Says "multiplayer" instead of "controller," mostly
on
Both Sides of Wii
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"(the two i's represent multiplayer action, you see)."
You can see what Nintendo's thinking, anyway: "We" recast with a double-whammy of the "i" thing -- iMac, iPod -- on the other end of the name. This is a name Nintendo would have chosen in order to play up the networked, multiplayer side of the new console.
If they had thought the controller needed to be emphasized, you'd maybe have something about "motion" or "kinetic" in the name. Seems like they didn't need to accomplish that, though, because basically anyone who's at all interested in consoles knows that about their new machine. So, use the name to play up the thing that's not gotten so much attention yet.
(Compare it with Microsoft's leaden touch: "X-Box Live." Implying that when you're not in multiplayer, the games are, what, dead? Nice.)
The other thing to say is that this industry is one of the few that could stand to run ads laughing at itself -- and the other consoles don't do that good a job of that. Both the XBox and the Playstation go with pretty macho adverts. I think of the 360 release and all the reviews were about how awe-inspiring King Kong's graphics supposedly were. Roar! If Nintendo makes some fun with its own name, suddenly people are laughing with them instead of at them. Don't believe me? Think of beer commercials. If any industry can do that, it would be one that makes games, right?
Major third-party developer reveals that, instead of producing an "inferior" port of one of their existing games (ahem! 360 Madden with pretty images but half the game play! cough!), they have dedicated a special team at their publishing house specifically to developing superior (as opposed to inferior) products for the new system. That team is actively using the new controller to create a game unlike the others it produces.
The big question about the Revolution is whether 3rd parties will support it, yeah, and one could take this as a sign that the bar is somewhat higher than for classic porting exercises, which we suspected anyway... But as a "warning" signal this is awfully early and says at least as much in the other direction, doesn't it?
Had no idea Ian Fleming had a background in Naval Intelligence... There was so little indication of any real experience in his work.
(But the point was that success isn't limited to crap pop fiction, and that more realistic material than Dan Brown's "shields are almost down" IT drivel could work.)
In general, yeah, you'd think people would mod themselves "redundant" or just "peurile" before they posted the 13-year-old's "comedic" material. But:
an additional cable, running to a camera... feeding into a nearby cabinet with a VCR.
Um, you're asking us to believe that this "creepy IT" guy was stringing a physical cable to a VCR, right? So he wasn't just creepy, he was also completely incompetent. Some details are not quite right, there, to do with this anecdote. Not that I don't believe the basic outlines, but something is not right.
Maybe they're at the same party, but Adobe hasn't been Apple's date for a while.
For years now there's been competition between the two companies in one spot or another. Adobe's CEO, Bruce Chizen, made some rather cutting remarks a few years back about the Mac OS generally, and last April described the relationship as "like a marriage where you're in it for the kids." Adobe generally has grown in Windows markets more than with the Mac -- with products like Acrobat -- and has made a point of saying so.
Quark, meanwhile, took so long to be OS X compatible that they caused the entire world of graphic designers to be incredibly wary of upgrading anything at all now.
"Strategic" decisions aren't immutable. Notice the chips Apple is shipping in its latest machines.
This is mass-market fiction, if it was authentic then it would not be as successful.
There are plenty of examples of both hacks and decent writers being successful. As successful -- maybe there you have a point -- but the question was whether he's a genius or a dork, and the "dork" clicker on my geiger counter just went off a ton during that excerpt.
John Grisham is putridly bad in terms of the legal setting he sets his pop schlock in, whereas Scott Turow is pretty danged good and gets his stuff close to plausible. Turow's novels are far superior to Grisham's as a result -- but Grisham's dumbed-down idiocy does get cranked out faster and make somewhat more money, that's true. John Lecarre, especially early on, was writing his espionage thrillers based on personal experience in British Intelligence; Ian Fleming was writing pop nonsense. They've both had their commercial successes. James Bond is an easier franchise to cash in on in those Hollywood movies you talk about -- but give me "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" any day.
The question was whether Dan Brown should be taken seriously. Looks like he's a trash pop fiction writer to me, that being the parent poster's point. There are much better examples of what he does. If you want the whole grand-conspiracy-across-history thing, Umberto Eco turned it inside out in Foucault's Pendulum in the 1980s, and Eco's about 700 times the novelist Dan Brown is...
Don't promote the carr(i)age and use of weapons of deadly force on one hand and then act holier-th(a)n-thou...
We have relations in Oklahoma. Decent folks, live and work on their family farm... and as susceptible to idiocy like this demagogue's "anti-violence" bill as anyone could be.
This is the state that elected Tom Coburn "Lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they'll only let one girl go to the bathroom" as a senator. It's a fricking demonstration case for Dick Nixon's "Southern Strategy" social issues being used to scare and dupe people.
In these folks' minds, promoting "anti-violence" legislation that addresses sexuality as if it's "violent" and preventing churches from controlling who brings concealed weapons to Sunday service are not fundamentally incompatible actions. We're talking my relatives -- whose response to my idea of putting numbers (10 cents, 25 cents) on our coinage was that it smacked of world government.
MS meant the new box to make inroads in Japan. They did advertise, that's just wrong anecdotal information on your part. The first XBox died in Japan and they wanted to do something to break into that market, no question.
"Since the launch of the original Xbox in 2002, there was one thing that we have consistently said: Microsoft will inevitably succeed in Japan." -- Takahashi Sensui, Microsoft Japan's Xbox division manager
"A major part of Xbox's troubles have stemmed from the lack of role-playing games, which are favored here over the shoot-'em-up and action games that tend to be hits in the U.S.
Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp. has made a point of signing on game designers popular in Japan to deliver works like "Final Fantasy XI," set to go on sale later this month."
...Microsoft will also beef up its entertainment downloads catering to Japanese tastes, such as animation trailers, and online gaming available on its online service Xbox Live."
Back in September The Register described MS's problems with Japan the previous time around:
"In a bid to get the product right for Japanese consumers, Microsoft was forced to delay the Xbox's introduction, from December 2001 to February 2002. Hints that it was pondering such a move surfaced way back in March 2001. It did little good, in any case. Microsoft went on to take the axe to its Japanese Xbox workforce in March 2003, before going on to announce a strategic rethink of the Japanese market the following July. Xbox has yet to dent Sony or Nintendo's sales in the country, however.
This time round, Microsoft has made sure it has recruited some of the biggest names in Japanese gaming to the cause. It said it would be showing titles from Square Enix, Genki, Konami, Taito, Namco and others at the Tokyo Games Show."
They clearly wanted to gain ground in Japan. Based on the huge advantage in release dates you'd think they'd have some traction. Right now their sales are last in that market -- behind the GameCube.
Meanwhile I can walk to the nearest GameCube here in Minneapolis and find 360s stacked up on the shelf selling at list price. Huge demand: no. Not here anyway. Some mild interest -- it's the newest thing -- but the kids playing Call of Duty down at Target can't afford to buy the dang thing.
Listen you idiots--if I make something and say it's art, and other people buy or view it (or whatever) and they say it's art, then guess what? IT'S ART, and it doesn't matter what anybody else says. That. Is. The. Whole. Damn. Point.
Okay. Let's take you at your word.
You say if you "make something and say it's art" that counts. Does the game industry actually send out this message? Does it, in any significant way, make claims about its work being art? That's not the message I'm getting as a member of the buying public. Honestly, I think the people who produced Legend of Zelda - Windwaker could make a claim to it -- but "art" is not among the big messages they're cranking out to encourage us to buy the thing, is it? It's only within the industry that they might use the word-- speaking of the pretentiousness you so deride?
On the other side of your terms, does the audience for games -- the people who "buy or view it (or whatever)" -- regard the games as "art"? Unprompted, if we asked 1,000 game buyers at a store why they were buying their games, I'd bet a miniscule percentage would use the word "art." So games fail your second term, too.
Neither the game studios nor their audience is likely to identify games as art without some sort of leading question. Does that pass the "art" sniff test?
Anyway, Roger Ebert is really making an argument about whether games are worthwhile as art. He'd probably agree that the TV series "Blind Date" is a sort of post-modern "art," and actually the guy wrote a soft pRon movie in his youth -- so snobbism of the sort you describe, maybe not so much.
On Ebert's terms, though, does the game industry concern itself with "deep" explorations of what it means to be human? You use the examples of the first two Fallout games. I played and enjoyed those. They had some great qualities, those games: great atmospheric music; a sense of a larger world and open-ended choices; classic post-apocalyptic sci fi imagery and setting. Did choosing between being "Small Framed" or not cross the threshhold to deeply explore what it meant to be human, though? Not really. Does one walk away from the game thinking about what it means to be alive, or whatever it is art does to you? Not really.
So is Ebert's little debate thing a snobbish waste of time? Personally I think people oughta be challenging the industry to think of itself this way. You look at the three big console makers, and Sony and MS are committed to the idea of "art means more pixels in the picture so it's sharper." Pretty lame. Nintendo, among the three, seems to see itself as producing some sort of larger "games as art" thing. And the/. spinoff from Ebert's little contrived discussion has just made me think about that a little more. Good result, right?
a smilodon fossil showing that an individual suffered a crippling leg break that had partially healed up (but never fully recovered), you have a strong indication that this animal was probably kept alive by getting food from others as it was most likely incapable of hunting for itself or adequately defending itself.
This argument is made particularly for the human species and its relations. Neanderthal skeletons showing extreme arthritis, healed broken bones that would have incapacitated the individual at least for hunting, and that kind of thing are used as a simple example of social characteristics one can see in the physical evidence. They cared for their injured and infirm. You can see it right there in the leg bone.
People new to fossil evidence are so often naive about how much it can show. Nope, the mammoths have molars like an herbivore. Duh. (The world of the evolution deniers is full of ludicrous arguments about Homo erectus being a subspecies of pygmies and that kind of thing, all of which prey on that naivete.)
For only having two ears, we humans are very good at determining the direction sounds come from. Thanks to the shape of the ear being able to sort sounds based on direction, we are able to know where a sound came from and whether it is background noise or not.
We're talking about how to know where a sound's from, and the natural world is full of good solutions to crib from in localizing noise.
Owls are particularly well-adapted to enhance hearing. Among the tricks they use are their concave "facial disks" of feathers. They also have ears that are markedly asymmetrical -- one opening will be higher than the other, in addition to their having different shapes, so they can judge the direction a sound's coming in top-to-bottom even better.
And speaking of links between hearing and sight, Barn owls have been shown to interpret sounds spatially in much the same way our brains interpret sight. (For a few different reasons Barn owls' hearing has been studied more than basically any other non-human species. Probably other owls perceive sounds in a similar way.)
If I was trying to make a hearing aid I'd be working to imitate the way owls do things, not designing directional mikes around something as clunky as existing glasses, personally. Anyone who's ever seen a barn owl or a Harrier quartering above a field can tell how intense their perception really is...
People are falling over themselves to say just how *utterly fantastic* the stock firmware and iTunes are, and how horrible Rockbox is for even attempting to change it.
Weird. I see several people saying they're happy with iTunes and don't agree with the premise of the article -- that "iTunes leaves a lot to be desired" (based on links to outdated and off-point criticisms).
Hatred I'm not reading. You're totally right that people are maybe more skeptical of Rockbox than they should be -- but let's blame the article submission for that. Saying "iTunes sucks, but Rockbox tries to fix it" is bound to get reactions like "iTunes sucks? Why do I like it then?"...
How come we're always just looking for the "missing link" for the human species? Have we found many other "missing links"?
Name your species -- whales, domestic dogs, cattle, modern antelope, sharks, squid, tapeworms, whatever -- and the fossil history won't be perfect but it'll be substantial. Darwin's insight was to explain the mechanism for change between one species and another -- but in terms of physical evidence, "Have we found many other 'missing links'?" is a no-brainer, because even back then the evidence was piling up.
The whole set of events that resulted in Darwin's Origin of Species was all about the enormous new body of evidence for species changing over time. Between the geology of Darwin's day, which showed the earth was of much greater antiquity than had been thought, and the colossal fossil finds that were happening, naturalists were presented with a raft of examples of transitional species: dinosaurs of course, but also all manner of species like fossil camels, burly "terror birds," and on and on. They were presented with overwhelming examples of species evolving, but they had to get their heads around the evidence to explain how things had happened.
And yeah, that does mean creationist objections to evolution have things exactly backwards when they talk about no evidence being there. Evolutionary theory started with evidence piling up to the point where it had to be explained.
The news just doesn't go crazy when someone finds a new fossil shark tooth, and it does play up the hominid remains. That's the only reason you had this idea.
yet the Hammer-and-Sickle remain(s) all the rage:-(
Maybe in your set. In my world, which granted is mostly comprised of people over the age of 26, I haven't seen a hammer and sickle t-shirt yet. The Che Guevara face shirts I've noticed in some sort of pop media context, but never seen in person.
In fact the overwhelming cultural weight in my world is thrown behind a lot of bogus "family values" and "support the troops" posturing that's nothing more than a thinly-veiled justification for exactly the sort of authoritarian views you yourself would probably detest in Soviet, or Che Guevara, admirers... There's absolutely no shortage of ribbons on the backs of cars to that effect -- "Support our Troops" meaning "Never criticize our foreign policy (as long as a God Fearin' Republican is in power)."
My parents called while I was in the locker room last week, and somehow the act of flipping the phone open looked suspicious to the gentleman shaving quite naked at the mirror nearby.
One of the black-clad trainers arrived to investigate my suspicious phone answering shortly thereafter. Had to scroll him through my few snaps to show him nothing was amiss. Still, he kept my phone safely behind the counter until I was ready to go. Reclaiming the phone later was plenty embarrassing.
(Personally I would prefer a ban on hanging out naked to shave out of some exhibitionistic impulse, but that's harder to define than "cell phone camera.")
The Dreamcast Ecco followed in the footsteps of the original game, which was a Genesis title I think. Both of them, for their time, had all that atmospheric stuff in their favor, and great, imaginative premises... and the most frustrating control schemes ever.
Seriously. I'm not a screaming-at-the-other-drivers sort of nitwit, and Ecco the Dolphin had me swearing at the screen and throwing the dang controller. Both versions had this same trait. They were maddening.
Um, anyone who has access to the live smallpox virus could try that blanket idea. First you have to get the virus to put on the blankets. Since 1980 when the virus was declared eradicated, the virus has been around only in laboratory stockpiles. The scary stuff, the "weaponized" versions we worry about, would come from the former Soviet arsenal.
Not that the blankets will work even if you get some ordinary virus to work with. I know, I know, the whole native American thing, but really that history is doubtful. It's unclear whether Jeffrey Amherst's plan to send out infected blankets was at all effective. Smallpox was already epidemic among native Americans.
Smallpox isn't the most robust virus. In lab conditions, 90% of aerosolized smallpox -- the delivery method of the Soviet stockpile -- dies within 24 hours. With some exposure to UV light it does more poorly. Blankets just wouldn't be your best choice.
So you don't have the virus, and you don't have an effective delivery system.
Slashdot Mirror
The US is not starting this race, but it'd be nice to keep up regardless.
From your SpaceDaily.com link above: "China will become the third nation after U.S. and Russia to possess an ASAT system." China can make arguments identical to yours about enlightened self-interest. They could make the same argument about WMDs -- and Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, and the regime in Iran have all done just that. Deterrence, etc.
They're very aggressive, your diver is right. A comparable species (supposedly) that's on the scale of architeuthis is the "colossal" squid. Very active, hooks on the suckers, and in other ways a little closer to Humboldts. There's a nice little diagram on that BBC page showing the scale next to an old double-decker London bus.
You know, that's not a bad idea. So far we've got footage of the one living, active giant squid ever, and it was caught on a (suitably huge) bait line. We also have never seen Sperm whales actually hunting on their long dives; a National Geographic "Search for the Giant Squid" special a few years ago attached some cameras to the whales and followed them down a while, but the Physeters were swimming in such close formation that they knocked the cameras off each other. Even the close group of whales was news to science, actually. Nobody really knows if, as is speculated, the Sperm whale's nose is actually part of a sonic weapon used to incapacitate its prey at depth. This is the largest predator (aside from "preying" on krill) that we've ever found in the world, and we know jack about it even though we've killed loads of them.
But let's run a camera disguised as Architeuthis down into something like the Kaikoura trench and see if we can't get footage of those whales coming in for a kill, shall we?
What a great idea you've had!
The wrongheadedness of that MS campaign is spectacular, isn't it? You can tell what they were thinking; basically the idea was to goad us into paying for upgrades to systems and app suites for which people aren't ponying up their upgrade fees. MS needs businesses, especially, to stay on that treadmill.
Talk about insulting their audience, though. That campaign is almost up there with the RIAA folks and their "our consumers are thieves" mindset. MS even does the RIAA one better -- because the point is that we're dinosaurs who are using Microsoft's old products. They trash us, and they trash their own software!
As a narrative device it's lame, okay, but frankly I'll take that over the postmodern delayed deus ex machine of the geek's solution to a technical problem: Oooh, our brainwizard has been working away steadily at a problem all plot long, and now that we're ten minutes shy of the ending, she's finally broken through the security system/discovered the answer to the riddle/broken the code. The writers may as well have Geordi adjust the trust old modulation on the phase transponder, it's the same plot device.
Lately we're up to the level found in the funnies (other than FoxTrot): names get dropped. Ooh, she "googled" that term! That's about how far we've gotten with the Web in movies and TV... and the brain dead comic strip "B.C." for that matter.
We both know the answer to your rhetorical question... Though some of them are 43-year-old fathers of three with profoundly disturbing internal lives, I suspect.
Hey, though, it's not just Slashdot. Salon's new letters section gets a handful of truly persistent trolls. Take a look in the "Broadsheet" area for anything posted by "BrightStar65" sometime. Yesterday in response to the story of a high school "top 25" list of girls (including detailed [vulgar] physical descriptions), BrightStar told us the girls were partly at fault for judging themselves in ways to do with their appearances. That's in the avowedly feminist area of a liberal site.
There's something about the anonymity of Web "handles" that brings out skeeviness. Our local paper requires actual names on its bulletin boards, and you get the political flames but nothing quite like Slashdot's "geeks are boys" feel.
For my money, Umberto Eco is about 800 times the writer Dan Brown or Arturo Perez-Reverte is. I've read "Name of the Rose" maybe six times over the years. It's deeply satisfying. Brown's just a Michael Crichton-level pop writer. He's disposable.
And boy, did I enjoy Alec Guinness in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" more than any James Bond movie ever. For entertainment, for any quality you care to name. That's a low-budget BBC miniseries against some of the priciest Hollywood products around, and it's clear which one's more entertaining for me.
It's great you want to be entertained. It's great that kids read Harry Potter, which is pretty poorly written (and in the last three books, execrably edited). We don't have to choose between entertaining and intelligent, though. It's not that sad a world.
You can see what Nintendo's thinking, anyway: "We" recast with a double-whammy of the "i" thing -- iMac, iPod -- on the other end of the name. This is a name Nintendo would have chosen in order to play up the networked, multiplayer side of the new console.
If they had thought the controller needed to be emphasized, you'd maybe have something about "motion" or "kinetic" in the name. Seems like they didn't need to accomplish that, though, because basically anyone who's at all interested in consoles knows that about their new machine. So, use the name to play up the thing that's not gotten so much attention yet.
(Compare it with Microsoft's leaden touch: "X-Box Live." Implying that when you're not in multiplayer, the games are, what, dead? Nice.)
The other thing to say is that this industry is one of the few that could stand to run ads laughing at itself -- and the other consoles don't do that good a job of that. Both the XBox and the Playstation go with pretty macho adverts. I think of the 360 release and all the reviews were about how awe-inspiring King Kong's graphics supposedly were. Roar! If Nintendo makes some fun with its own name, suddenly people are laughing with them instead of at them. Don't believe me? Think of beer commercials. If any industry can do that, it would be one that makes games, right?
The big question about the Revolution is whether 3rd parties will support it, yeah, and one could take this as a sign that the bar is somewhat higher than for classic porting exercises, which we suspected anyway... But as a "warning" signal this is awfully early and says at least as much in the other direction, doesn't it?
(But the point was that success isn't limited to crap pop fiction, and that more realistic material than Dan Brown's "shields are almost down" IT drivel could work.)
For years now there's been competition between the two companies in one spot or another. Adobe's CEO, Bruce Chizen, made some rather cutting remarks a few years back about the Mac OS generally, and last April described the relationship as "like a marriage where you're in it for the kids." Adobe generally has grown in Windows markets more than with the Mac -- with products like Acrobat -- and has made a point of saying so.
Quark, meanwhile, took so long to be OS X compatible that they caused the entire world of graphic designers to be incredibly wary of upgrading anything at all now.
"Strategic" decisions aren't immutable. Notice the chips Apple is shipping in its latest machines.
There are plenty of examples of both hacks and decent writers being successful. As successful -- maybe there you have a point -- but the question was whether he's a genius or a dork, and the "dork" clicker on my geiger counter just went off a ton during that excerpt.
John Grisham is putridly bad in terms of the legal setting he sets his pop schlock in, whereas Scott Turow is pretty danged good and gets his stuff close to plausible. Turow's novels are far superior to Grisham's as a result -- but Grisham's dumbed-down idiocy does get cranked out faster and make somewhat more money, that's true. John Lecarre, especially early on, was writing his espionage thrillers based on personal experience in British Intelligence; Ian Fleming was writing pop nonsense. They've both had their commercial successes. James Bond is an easier franchise to cash in on in those Hollywood movies you talk about -- but give me "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" any day.
The question was whether Dan Brown should be taken seriously. Looks like he's a trash pop fiction writer to me, that being the parent poster's point. There are much better examples of what he does. If you want the whole grand-conspiracy-across-history thing, Umberto Eco turned it inside out in Foucault's Pendulum in the 1980s, and Eco's about 700 times the novelist Dan Brown is...
We have relations in Oklahoma. Decent folks, live and work on their family farm... and as susceptible to idiocy like this demagogue's "anti-violence" bill as anyone could be.
This is the state that elected Tom Coburn "Lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they'll only let one girl go to the bathroom" as a senator. It's a fricking demonstration case for Dick Nixon's "Southern Strategy" social issues being used to scare and dupe people.
In these folks' minds, promoting "anti-violence" legislation that addresses sexuality as if it's "violent" and preventing churches from controlling who brings concealed weapons to Sunday service are not fundamentally incompatible actions. We're talking my relatives -- whose response to my idea of putting numbers (10 cents, 25 cents) on our coinage was that it smacked of world government.
From this Boston.com article:
Back in September The Register described MS's problems with Japan the previous time around:
They clearly wanted to gain ground in Japan. Based on the huge advantage in release dates you'd think they'd have some traction. Right now their sales are last in that market -- behind the GameCube.
Meanwhile I can walk to the nearest GameCube here in Minneapolis and find 360s stacked up on the shelf selling at list price. Huge demand: no. Not here anyway. Some mild interest -- it's the newest thing -- but the kids playing Call of Duty down at Target can't afford to buy the dang thing.
Okay. Let's take you at your word.
You say if you "make something and say it's art" that counts. Does the game industry actually send out this message? Does it, in any significant way, make claims about its work being art? That's not the message I'm getting as a member of the buying public. Honestly, I think the people who produced Legend of Zelda - Windwaker could make a claim to it -- but "art" is not among the big messages they're cranking out to encourage us to buy the thing, is it? It's only within the industry that they might use the word-- speaking of the pretentiousness you so deride?
On the other side of your terms, does the audience for games -- the people who "buy or view it (or whatever)" -- regard the games as "art"? Unprompted, if we asked 1,000 game buyers at a store why they were buying their games, I'd bet a miniscule percentage would use the word "art." So games fail your second term, too.
Neither the game studios nor their audience is likely to identify games as art without some sort of leading question. Does that pass the "art" sniff test?
Anyway, Roger Ebert is really making an argument about whether games are worthwhile as art. He'd probably agree that the TV series "Blind Date" is a sort of post-modern "art," and actually the guy wrote a soft pRon movie in his youth -- so snobbism of the sort you describe, maybe not so much.
On Ebert's terms, though, does the game industry concern itself with "deep" explorations of what it means to be human? You use the examples of the first two Fallout games. I played and enjoyed those. They had some great qualities, those games: great atmospheric music; a sense of a larger world and open-ended choices; classic post-apocalyptic sci fi imagery and setting. Did choosing between being "Small Framed" or not cross the threshhold to deeply explore what it meant to be human, though? Not really. Does one walk away from the game thinking about what it means to be alive, or whatever it is art does to you? Not really.
So is Ebert's little debate thing a snobbish waste of time? Personally I think people oughta be challenging the industry to think of itself this way. You look at the three big console makers, and Sony and MS are committed to the idea of "art means more pixels in the picture so it's sharper." Pretty lame. Nintendo, among the three, seems to see itself as producing some sort of larger "games as art" thing. And the /. spinoff from Ebert's little contrived discussion has just made me think about that a little more. Good result, right?
This argument is made particularly for the human species and its relations. Neanderthal skeletons showing extreme arthritis, healed broken bones that would have incapacitated the individual at least for hunting, and that kind of thing are used as a simple example of social characteristics one can see in the physical evidence. They cared for their injured and infirm. You can see it right there in the leg bone.
People new to fossil evidence are so often naive about how much it can show. Nope, the mammoths have molars like an herbivore. Duh. (The world of the evolution deniers is full of ludicrous arguments about Homo erectus being a subspecies of pygmies and that kind of thing, all of which prey on that naivete.)
We're talking about how to know where a sound's from, and the natural world is full of good solutions to crib from in localizing noise.
Owls are particularly well-adapted to enhance hearing. Among the tricks they use are their concave "facial disks" of feathers. They also have ears that are markedly asymmetrical -- one opening will be higher than the other, in addition to their having different shapes, so they can judge the direction a sound's coming in top-to-bottom even better.
And speaking of links between hearing and sight, Barn owls have been shown to interpret sounds spatially in much the same way our brains interpret sight. (For a few different reasons Barn owls' hearing has been studied more than basically any other non-human species. Probably other owls perceive sounds in a similar way.)
If I was trying to make a hearing aid I'd be working to imitate the way owls do things, not designing directional mikes around something as clunky as existing glasses, personally. Anyone who's ever seen a barn owl or a Harrier quartering above a field can tell how intense their perception really is...
Weird. I see several people saying they're happy with iTunes and don't agree with the premise of the article -- that "iTunes leaves a lot to be desired" (based on links to outdated and off-point criticisms).
Hatred I'm not reading. You're totally right that people are maybe more skeptical of Rockbox than they should be -- but let's blame the article submission for that. Saying "iTunes sucks, but Rockbox tries to fix it" is bound to get reactions like "iTunes sucks? Why do I like it then?"...
Name your species -- whales, domestic dogs, cattle, modern antelope, sharks, squid, tapeworms, whatever -- and the fossil history won't be perfect but it'll be substantial. Darwin's insight was to explain the mechanism for change between one species and another -- but in terms of physical evidence, "Have we found many other 'missing links'?" is a no-brainer, because even back then the evidence was piling up.
The whole set of events that resulted in Darwin's Origin of Species was all about the enormous new body of evidence for species changing over time. Between the geology of Darwin's day, which showed the earth was of much greater antiquity than had been thought, and the colossal fossil finds that were happening, naturalists were presented with a raft of examples of transitional species: dinosaurs of course, but also all manner of species like fossil camels, burly "terror birds," and on and on. They were presented with overwhelming examples of species evolving, but they had to get their heads around the evidence to explain how things had happened.
And yeah, that does mean creationist objections to evolution have things exactly backwards when they talk about no evidence being there. Evolutionary theory started with evidence piling up to the point where it had to be explained.
The news just doesn't go crazy when someone finds a new fossil shark tooth, and it does play up the hominid remains. That's the only reason you had this idea.
Maybe in your set. In my world, which granted is mostly comprised of people over the age of 26, I haven't seen a hammer and sickle t-shirt yet. The Che Guevara face shirts I've noticed in some sort of pop media context, but never seen in person.
In fact the overwhelming cultural weight in my world is thrown behind a lot of bogus "family values" and "support the troops" posturing that's nothing more than a thinly-veiled justification for exactly the sort of authoritarian views you yourself would probably detest in Soviet, or Che Guevara, admirers... There's absolutely no shortage of ribbons on the backs of cars to that effect -- "Support our Troops" meaning "Never criticize our foreign policy (as long as a God Fearin' Republican is in power)."
One of the black-clad trainers arrived to investigate my suspicious phone answering shortly thereafter. Had to scroll him through my few snaps to show him nothing was amiss. Still, he kept my phone safely behind the counter until I was ready to go. Reclaiming the phone later was plenty embarrassing.
(Personally I would prefer a ban on hanging out naked to shave out of some exhibitionistic impulse, but that's harder to define than "cell phone camera.")
We sure needed to hand out awards for that sort of imaginative use of a new medium. Without an Emmy, how would it get any recognition? I ask you.
Seriously. I'm not a screaming-at-the-other-drivers sort of nitwit, and Ecco the Dolphin had me swearing at the screen and throwing the dang controller. Both versions had this same trait. They were maddening.
Not that the blankets will work even if you get some ordinary virus to work with. I know, I know, the whole native American thing, but really that history is doubtful. It's unclear whether Jeffrey Amherst's plan to send out infected blankets was at all effective. Smallpox was already epidemic among native Americans.
Smallpox isn't the most robust virus. In lab conditions, 90% of aerosolized smallpox -- the delivery method of the Soviet stockpile -- dies within 24 hours. With some exposure to UV light it does more poorly. Blankets just wouldn't be your best choice.
So you don't have the virus, and you don't have an effective delivery system.