A party of cranks is much easier to defeat than a party of reasonable people.
You know, that's what our side was saying... until November 2.
And as a Republican, can you honestly say that you support this war? Or that you're happy with the $145 billion in corporate tax giveaways that Bush signed into law on the eve of the election? How about the enormous defecit that we're going to have to pay back over the next century? Do you have kids in Iraq that are getting shot at in some fool's errand of a war that benefits only the president's corporate backers? Do you really believe that Saddam Hussein was more of a threat than Osama bin Laden?
And most importantly, can you honestly call this administration "conservative" and keep a straight face? They've massively increased spending all over the place; they've dramatically curtailed civil liberties, and the two major, galvanizing issues around which they rallied voters are both attempts to force Christian ideology on the rest of the country. Right-wing, indeed.
I'd like to know why you support the GOP. I really would; I simply don't understand how a rational person can. You'll notice that I'm not posting this as AC; that's because I really would appreciate a response. Any chance you'd care to shed some light on the issue?
So you advocate leaving Iraq in the condition that it's in?
Look, the war in Iraq was a terrible, terrible mistake. Every thinking, intelligent person I know would agree with you on that. Most of us agreed on that before the war even started. But now that we've completely destroyed their country, I think we have an obligation to restore some semblance of order before we leave.
I really and truly wish we could turn the clock back and erase the ugliness and bloodshed that we've perpetrated over the past year and a half. Everyone does. But that's simply not possible. If it were me, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night because of the knowledge that I'd driven an entire country full of innocent people from relative order to complete warlord-dominated anarchy.
The battery life issues aren't that simple. Regardless of how much tweaking you do, the damn thing is going to consume a ton of power--that's what happens when you use mechanical storage and a big, backlit LCD. Not to mention the rest of the hardware. That, in turn, leads to a number of problems:
Big batteries are heavy. I don't know if anyone outside of Sony has actually had a chance to even hold a PSP, but I'd wager that they're pretty damn heavy, maybe even in the "you'd best wear a belt if you plan on putting that thing in your pocket" range.
Rechargeable batteries lose capacity over time. Those two hours of minimum usage reflect what you get out of the system on the first charge, and it's all downhill from there. Which leads to my next point...
Rechargeable batteries are expensive. Eventually, rechargeable cells need to be replaced, and they're not exactly cheap. Furthermore, knowing Sony, they'll charge out the ass for accessories--last I checked, they were charging $100 for simple laptop AC adaptors and $30 for video cables. And if we're really lucky, we might have to send our PSP's back to the factory to get the batteries replaced. For a nominal fee, of course. (The repair fee on the infamously accident-prone PS2 stands at a cool $120, just $30 short of the price of buying a new one. Which I've had to do twice. I'm up to PlayStation 6.)
One really has to wonder what they've been smoking at Sony headquarters. Given the preferences of the market, I predict that they'll sell about three of these in Japan.
On the bright side, I guess that means we don't have to worry about the U.S. launch being delayed due to lack of supply...
You've got to wonder what these people were thinking from the get-go. Square (even pre-acquisition) has a history of, errrm, aggressive litigation. I remember that Final Fantasy Online had some fun exchanges with their lawyers a few years back.
Not to mention the fact that they're Japanese. In addition to the Japanese corporate culture, where non-traditional ways of doing business don't make it very far, it would also be very difficult to buy up infringing assets (that are probably completely incompatible with whatever development tools they use in-house) from a few foreigners who literally don't even speak the same language as the rest of their development staff.
The real surprise to me in all of this is that there are people talented enough to produce work of this quality (it looks excellent), and yet stupid or naive enough to think that they'd be able to distribute it legally or sell it to a major multinational corporation headquartered on the other side of the world.
I mean, I like seeing projects like this, but it seems like a little bit of forethought would have prevented thousands of hours of wasted effort. It truly is a shame.
Higher-precision color is part of the DirectX 9 spec, which means that it's supported by the newest ATI and NVidia cards. I'm not sure about displays, though.
XGA is 1024x768. It's pretty much standard on (lower-end) laptops these days (and probably desktops, too, for that matter).
Ultra XGA, or UXGA, is 1600x1200. That's about as good as consumer-level equipment gets at the moment.
Then there's Wide Ultra XGA, or UXGA-W (although I usually see it written as "WUXGA"). Essentially the same as UXGA, but with a wider aspect ratio (1920x1200).
The "Q" most likely stands for "quad."
So yeah, it does make a little sense. That being said, if I mention this to someone, I'll probably go with "3840x2400," myself.
Possibly. Or it means that said rumored handheld isn't expected to make it to market any time near the release of the DS or the titles that Rare's developing.
Personally, I find the prospect of a Microsoft-designed handheld to be a little scary, considering what the original XBox controller looked like.
It's pretty well-known that electronics hardware manufacturers of all kinds (including PC OEM's) operate on razor-thin margins. Because of this, most of the profit on computer systems comes from markup on the bundled OS.
Microsoft offers copies of Windows to members of its OEM program at a very deep discount. Without this discount, manufacturers would find it very difficult to remain competitive on price. Naturally, MS is very aware of the amount of control over OEM's that this puts in their hands, and they use it liberally. (coughabuse of monopoly powercough) If you piss off Microsoft, you risk being dropped from their partner program, at which point you're basically dead. That's why you see so few Linux desktops from major manufacturers--they're scared shitless of Microsoft.
So, yeah, Dell might be the one forcing you to accept a copy of WinXP with your computer, but it's really Microsoft's fault. The fact that these circumstances do not apply to any other OS developer is exactly what makes MS a monopoly in the first place.
Don't feel bad, though. If you weren't paying for an OEM copy of XP, your hardware costs would probably increase significantly anyway, since OEM's need to make money somewhere. So I guess it's a wash.
Note that the two projects they've released as open-source are:
Only for Windows.
Dependent enough on the Windows architecture that they'd be useless if ported elsewhere.
It makes sense for Microsoft. They get all the benefits of open source development, they enrich the tools available to Windows developers, and it's very unlikely that it'll ever be useful to anyone not developing for Microsoft products.
Kanji aren't easy to be sure, but I'd wager they're just as difficult as the wealth of non-phonetic vocabulary required for Western students. Words like 'rendezvous', 'necessary', and 'ersatz' are all difficult to learn for kids, yet they make do.
You know you're reaching when words like "rendezvous" and "ersatz" are your examples of words that people need to function in society.:) (And by "function," I'm talking about the level of ability required to do basic things like go food shopping and read directions.) The size of the "alphabet" used in Kanji compounds (1945, counting by character; a few hundred if you'd rather count them by radicals and variants thereof) is also larger than the equivalent in English (26; 30 in Spanish, although I believe that three of the additional four [ch, ll, rr] are no longer part of the alphabet in some countries; ñ remains) by several orders of magnitude. Also, please note that the purpose of my original post was to compare Japanese to Spanish, not English. With a few exceptions (most of which are colloquial and of foreign origin, such as the Mexican pronunciations of 'Mexico' and 'Oaxaca'), Spanish is a purely phonetic written language.
This is why things like 'Migurushii inu ga imasu.' make sense -- it's the fact that the dog is ugly that is important, not that it's your dog.
You're underselling the flexibility of English. I'd say that in that example sentence, the emphasis is on ownership. (The subject is "I".) One could easily say "My dog is ugly" or "The dog is ugly" and not stress the ownership so much (or at all). (Incidentally, I'd say that the concept of ownership in English is less artificial than you seem to indicate--it's not that we overemphasize the issue as much as the Japanese try to avoid it. Of course, as an American, I'm clearly biased.)
Regardless of language, it seems like people can express the same range of ideas fairly consistently. (Observe that a lot of the things that you supposedly can't say in Japanese are very easily achieveable, albeit very rude, in colloquial speech and slang.) The difference is the level of subtlety and implicitness that Japanese encourages. Again, I'm not saying it's inherently more difficult from an objective point of view; simply that it's very counterintuitive to those of us raised on (at least partially) Latin-based languages.
Umm, there's a big difference between having a bunch of connected tables in memory and a distributed database system. I'm not a lexicographer or anything, but I think the word "distributed" connotes an amount of (usually physical) separation between nodes. If you're talking about the back end of an MMORPG, you could probably get away with calling it a distributed database system. But not a single-player game--at least, not one that isn't running on a cluster or something.
Yes, the comment was out of context, mostly because the parent post said pretty much everything I would have said about the article. If you'd like a more relevant critique, here it is:
I think your article makes a few good points that are entirely misguided and more applicable to ToEE (a mediocre game at best) than to the d20 system as a whole (which has been behind a number of stellar computerized RPG's).
Ideally, a set of rules works anywhere. There are three readily apparent differences between running d20 on a tabletop and running d20 on a Pentium 4: the lack of a [G|D]M, the inability of a game engine to understand English (or whatever language the user speaks), and, of course, the speed factor. The first two of these are major issues, and are probably the biggest obstacles in developing a good computerized RPG.
Not having a human GM is a really big deal. In fact, it most likely alters the nature of the game to a major extent. Most good computerized RPG's fall into one of two categories: the linear story (sometimes called "the interactive movie") and the dungeon hack. Each of these lacks the amazing flexibility that tabletop RPG's have always featured. If you're looking for a freeform RPG experience, get some friends, some furniture and some Mountain Dew--you're not going to find what you're looking for on a computer. At least not until AI advances a good deal. If you start playing a CRPG (I've never heard this abbreviation before, but I'll use it from here on for brevity's sake) with the expectation of emulating the tabletop experience, you're going to be severely disappointed.
I also think that you're unclear about where the line between d20 and D&D is drawn. d20 is nothing more than a set of mathematical formulas--spells, weapons, and even the attributes given to entities within the game are all part of the game, and not the system.
d20, when properly implemented, works great for CRPG's. Look at everything that Bioware has produced over the last six years: Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, Neverwinter Nights, Icewind Dale, and Knights of the Old Republic were all fantastic, well-balanced games. All were based on d20.
And if you're talking standardization of rules, this aspect is also independent of the d20 system. If ToEE is poorly balanced, it's entirely the fault of the developers--a die roll is a die roll; it's only the external factors (such as character stats) that cause imbalance.
All in all, you make some good points, but grossy misapply them. It's not d20 that sucks, but ToEE. And you need to choose your words more carefully. Using big words where they don't apply only leads to confusion.
My favorite part is his use of the term "distributed database." I'd comment further, but I have to go finish building my 4-CPU cluster of SQL Server boxen so I can play Final Fantasy.
One game not mentioned in that heavily implements some of the concepts in the article is Namco/Monolith's forthcoming RPG, Baten Kaitos. (Released in December 2003 in Japan; NA/European release dates TBA.)
In Kaitos, the player assumes the role of a guiding "spirit" that travels with the main character throughout the story. It's a pretty cool concept, actually: the main character "introduces" each new party member to you as you play, and asks you for input before making a decision. It doesn't really affect gameplay much, but it draws a concrete line between the player and the main character, something which has seldom been done in the genre.
Nintendo 64 was released eight years ago. Nintendo is still milking profits from it--it was launched under a year ago in China as the iQue. My point is that while you, me and most enthusiasts will have no use for a PS2 in six years, some demographic probably will.
Sure is. The title screen (first page, third row, third from left) reads "akumajou dorakyura", or "Demon Castle Dracula." The "Castievania" moniker wasn't used on any of the Japanese games in the series until very recently. (With the more recent GBA releases, IIRC.)
There's all kinds of great stuff available, even if some of it is very old. You can even get an implementation of SHRDLU with the mechanical components replaced by a 3D Java layer.
SHRDLU, like most AI projects written in the past 40 years, uses LISP, so it's actually not that hard to read. (Incidentally, SHRDLU is more than a bit unstable, but if you can get it to work, it's pretty amazing, especially for something written in the 70's.) Definitely worth a look, if only for the "coolness" factor.
One of the greatest things about AI is that most of the work on it comes from academia--virtually everything is available for free, if you know where to look.
As for cleaning out the mal-ware, can anyone tell the difference between the OS and 3rd party stuff?
Not without gaining a pretty good knowledge of Windows internals. Once you've been, um, blessed with such a gift, it becomes pretty obvious what's real and what isn't, at least as far as processes and services go.
That's only useful in diagnosing major problems, though. (Like when MSBlaster went around.) And cleaning things out completely is really tough: most malware automagically respawns all of its components unless you manage to remove all of them simultaneously, and I've even seen tricks played with filehandles that can't be closed without rebooting, upon which everything is reinstalled. Generally, I just run Ad-Aware about once a week. Why spend so much time scouring your machine and googling filenames when there's cheap or free software to do it for you?
You're forgetting a few. Mario Sunshine was definitely not Mario 64, but it was a fantastic game in its own right. And if you have three friends, four Game Boys and four link cables, you can't find anything more fun than Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. (Except maybe binge drinking or bong hits.)
This is at least the industry's second major embarrassment in as many years. Anyone remember the leaking capacitors? Widely deploying a new material without first testing it is akin to making major changes to a production piece of software and shipping it as soon as you get it to compile. Worse, even, because hardware isn't so easily "patched," and is much more likely to find its way into systems (i.e. automotive controllers) whose failure can actually kill people. If I were a buyer for an IC manufacturer, Sumitomo would have just earned itself a position atop my "never, ever do business with again" list. What they've done is terrible for their industry, as well as the multitude of other high-tech industries that depend on them.
There's a big difference. The Diebold and Halloween memos were most likely leaked by people who thought they were doing the public a service. In the case of Diebold, you can't really debate that they weren't. The "whistleblowers" didn't profit at all from their actions, and, most importantly, they weren't elected officials. Call me old-fashioned, but it still turns my stomach to see elected officials displaying a complete disregard for the law, the public good, and what is morally right. Not to mention the damage that they do to the credibility of all politicians in the country with such treachery--even the few honest ones.
Heck, I thought they were going to use the 8cm discs in thier newer products and for it to be a "de facto standard". Looks like they are sticking with solid state.
Discs mean motors, which means shorter battery life. Until portable nuclear reactors are readily available, cartridges make a lot of sense for portable systems.
Slashdot Mirror
A party of cranks is much easier to defeat than a party of reasonable people.
You know, that's what our side was saying... until November 2.
And as a Republican, can you honestly say that you support this war? Or that you're happy with the $145 billion in corporate tax giveaways that Bush signed into law on the eve of the election? How about the enormous defecit that we're going to have to pay back over the next century? Do you have kids in Iraq that are getting shot at in some fool's errand of a war that benefits only the president's corporate backers? Do you really believe that Saddam Hussein was more of a threat than Osama bin Laden?
And most importantly, can you honestly call this administration "conservative" and keep a straight face? They've massively increased spending all over the place; they've dramatically curtailed civil liberties, and the two major, galvanizing issues around which they rallied voters are both attempts to force Christian ideology on the rest of the country. Right-wing, indeed.
I'd like to know why you support the GOP. I really would; I simply don't understand how a rational person can. You'll notice that I'm not posting this as AC; that's because I really would appreciate a response. Any chance you'd care to shed some light on the issue?
So you advocate leaving Iraq in the condition that it's in?
Look, the war in Iraq was a terrible, terrible mistake. Every thinking, intelligent person I know would agree with you on that. Most of us agreed on that before the war even started. But now that we've completely destroyed their country, I think we have an obligation to restore some semblance of order before we leave.
I really and truly wish we could turn the clock back and erase the ugliness and bloodshed that we've perpetrated over the past year and a half. Everyone does. But that's simply not possible. If it were me, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night because of the knowledge that I'd driven an entire country full of innocent people from relative order to complete warlord-dominated anarchy.
The battery life issues aren't that simple. Regardless of how much tweaking you do, the damn thing is going to consume a ton of power--that's what happens when you use mechanical storage and a big, backlit LCD. Not to mention the rest of the hardware. That, in turn, leads to a number of problems:
One really has to wonder what they've been smoking at Sony headquarters. Given the preferences of the market, I predict that they'll sell about three of these in Japan.
On the bright side, I guess that means we don't have to worry about the U.S. launch being delayed due to lack of supply...
You've got to wonder what these people were thinking from the get-go. Square (even pre-acquisition) has a history of, errrm, aggressive litigation. I remember that Final Fantasy Online had some fun exchanges with their lawyers a few years back.
Not to mention the fact that they're Japanese. In addition to the Japanese corporate culture, where non-traditional ways of doing business don't make it very far, it would also be very difficult to buy up infringing assets (that are probably completely incompatible with whatever development tools they use in-house) from a few foreigners who literally don't even speak the same language as the rest of their development staff.
The real surprise to me in all of this is that there are people talented enough to produce work of this quality (it looks excellent), and yet stupid or naive enough to think that they'd be able to distribute it legally or sell it to a major multinational corporation headquartered on the other side of the world.
I mean, I like seeing projects like this, but it seems like a little bit of forethought would have prevented thousands of hours of wasted effort. It truly is a shame.
Higher-precision color is part of the DirectX 9 spec, which means that it's supported by the newest ATI and NVidia cards. I'm not sure about displays, though.
XGA is 1024x768. It's pretty much standard on (lower-end) laptops these days (and probably desktops, too, for that matter).
Ultra XGA, or UXGA, is 1600x1200. That's about as good as consumer-level equipment gets at the moment.
Then there's Wide Ultra XGA, or UXGA-W (although I usually see it written as "WUXGA"). Essentially the same as UXGA, but with a wider aspect ratio (1920x1200).
The "Q" most likely stands for "quad."
So yeah, it does make a little sense. That being said, if I mention this to someone, I'll probably go with "3840x2400," myself.
Slashdot Japan has one.
Possibly. Or it means that said rumored handheld isn't expected to make it to market any time near the release of the DS or the titles that Rare's developing.
Personally, I find the prospect of a Microsoft-designed handheld to be a little scary, considering what the original XBox controller looked like.
This is indeed mostly attributable to Microsoft.
It's pretty well-known that electronics hardware manufacturers of all kinds (including PC OEM's) operate on razor-thin margins. Because of this, most of the profit on computer systems comes from markup on the bundled OS.
Microsoft offers copies of Windows to members of its OEM program at a very deep discount. Without this discount, manufacturers would find it very difficult to remain competitive on price. Naturally, MS is very aware of the amount of control over OEM's that this puts in their hands, and they use it liberally. (coughabuse of monopoly powercough) If you piss off Microsoft, you risk being dropped from their partner program, at which point you're basically dead. That's why you see so few Linux desktops from major manufacturers--they're scared shitless of Microsoft.
So, yeah, Dell might be the one forcing you to accept a copy of WinXP with your computer, but it's really Microsoft's fault. The fact that these circumstances do not apply to any other OS developer is exactly what makes MS a monopoly in the first place.
Don't feel bad, though. If you weren't paying for an OEM copy of XP, your hardware costs would probably increase significantly anyway, since OEM's need to make money somewhere. So I guess it's a wash.
Note that the two projects they've released as open-source are:
It makes sense for Microsoft. They get all the benefits of open source development, they enrich the tools available to Windows developers, and it's very unlikely that it'll ever be useful to anyone not developing for Microsoft products.
Kanji aren't easy to be sure, but I'd wager they're just as difficult as the wealth of non-phonetic vocabulary required for Western students. Words like 'rendezvous', 'necessary', and 'ersatz' are all difficult to learn for kids, yet they make do.
You know you're reaching when words like "rendezvous" and "ersatz" are your examples of words that people need to function in society. :) (And by "function," I'm talking about the level of ability required to do basic things like go food shopping and read directions.) The size of the "alphabet" used in Kanji compounds (1945, counting by character; a few hundred if you'd rather count them by radicals and variants thereof) is also larger than the equivalent in English (26; 30 in Spanish, although I believe that three of the additional four [ch, ll, rr] are no longer part of the alphabet in some countries; ñ remains) by several orders of magnitude. Also, please note that the purpose of my original post was to compare Japanese to Spanish, not English. With a few exceptions (most of which are colloquial and of foreign origin, such as the Mexican pronunciations of 'Mexico' and 'Oaxaca'), Spanish is a purely phonetic written language.
This is why things like 'Migurushii inu ga imasu.' make sense -- it's the fact that the dog is ugly that is important, not that it's your dog.
You're underselling the flexibility of English. I'd say that in that example sentence, the emphasis is on ownership. (The subject is "I".) One could easily say "My dog is ugly" or "The dog is ugly" and not stress the ownership so much (or at all). (Incidentally, I'd say that the concept of ownership in English is less artificial than you seem to indicate--it's not that we overemphasize the issue as much as the Japanese try to avoid it. Of course, as an American, I'm clearly biased.)
Regardless of language, it seems like people can express the same range of ideas fairly consistently. (Observe that a lot of the things that you supposedly can't say in Japanese are very easily achieveable, albeit very rude, in colloquial speech and slang.) The difference is the level of subtlety and implicitness that Japanese encourages. Again, I'm not saying it's inherently more difficult from an objective point of view; simply that it's very counterintuitive to those of us raised on (at least partially) Latin-based languages.
Do you think I used enough parentheses?
Umm, there's a big difference between having a bunch of connected tables in memory and a distributed database system. I'm not a lexicographer or anything, but I think the word "distributed" connotes an amount of (usually physical) separation between nodes. If you're talking about the back end of an MMORPG, you could probably get away with calling it a distributed database system. But not a single-player game--at least, not one that isn't running on a cluster or something.
Yes, the comment was out of context, mostly because the parent post said pretty much everything I would have said about the article. If you'd like a more relevant critique, here it is:
I think your article makes a few good points that are entirely misguided and more applicable to ToEE (a mediocre game at best) than to the d20 system as a whole (which has been behind a number of stellar computerized RPG's).
Ideally, a set of rules works anywhere. There are three readily apparent differences between running d20 on a tabletop and running d20 on a Pentium 4: the lack of a [G|D]M, the inability of a game engine to understand English (or whatever language the user speaks), and, of course, the speed factor. The first two of these are major issues, and are probably the biggest obstacles in developing a good computerized RPG.
Not having a human GM is a really big deal. In fact, it most likely alters the nature of the game to a major extent. Most good computerized RPG's fall into one of two categories: the linear story (sometimes called "the interactive movie") and the dungeon hack. Each of these lacks the amazing flexibility that tabletop RPG's have always featured. If you're looking for a freeform RPG experience, get some friends, some furniture and some Mountain Dew--you're not going to find what you're looking for on a computer. At least not until AI advances a good deal. If you start playing a CRPG (I've never heard this abbreviation before, but I'll use it from here on for brevity's sake) with the expectation of emulating the tabletop experience, you're going to be severely disappointed.
I also think that you're unclear about where the line between d20 and D&D is drawn. d20 is nothing more than a set of mathematical formulas--spells, weapons, and even the attributes given to entities within the game are all part of the game, and not the system.
d20, when properly implemented, works great for CRPG's. Look at everything that Bioware has produced over the last six years: Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, Neverwinter Nights, Icewind Dale, and Knights of the Old Republic were all fantastic, well-balanced games. All were based on d20.
And if you're talking standardization of rules, this aspect is also independent of the d20 system. If ToEE is poorly balanced, it's entirely the fault of the developers--a die roll is a die roll; it's only the external factors (such as character stats) that cause imbalance.
All in all, you make some good points, but grossy misapply them. It's not d20 that sucks, but ToEE. And you need to choose your words more carefully. Using big words where they don't apply only leads to confusion.
My favorite part is his use of the term "distributed database." I'd comment further, but I have to go finish building my 4-CPU cluster of SQL Server boxen so I can play Final Fantasy.
One game not mentioned in that heavily implements some of the concepts in the article is Namco/Monolith's forthcoming RPG, Baten Kaitos. (Released in December 2003 in Japan; NA/European release dates TBA.)
In Kaitos, the player assumes the role of a guiding "spirit" that travels with the main character throughout the story. It's a pretty cool concept, actually: the main character "introduces" each new party member to you as you play, and asks you for input before making a decision. It doesn't really affect gameplay much, but it draws a concrete line between the player and the main character, something which has seldom been done in the genre.
Nintendo 64 was released eight years ago. Nintendo is still milking profits from it--it was launched under a year ago in China as the iQue. My point is that while you, me and most enthusiasts will have no use for a PS2 in six years, some demographic probably will.
Sure is. The title screen (first page, third row, third from left) reads "akumajou dorakyura", or "Demon Castle Dracula." The "Castievania" moniker wasn't used on any of the Japanese games in the series until very recently. (With the more recent GBA releases, IIRC.)
There's all kinds of great stuff available, even if some of it is very old. You can even get an implementation of SHRDLU with the mechanical components replaced by a 3D Java layer.
SHRDLU, like most AI projects written in the past 40 years, uses LISP, so it's actually not that hard to read. (Incidentally, SHRDLU is more than a bit unstable, but if you can get it to work, it's pretty amazing, especially for something written in the 70's.) Definitely worth a look, if only for the "coolness" factor.
One of the greatest things about AI is that most of the work on it comes from academia--virtually everything is available for free, if you know where to look.
Well, first you'd have to figure out how to divide by zero.
As for cleaning out the mal-ware, can anyone tell the difference between the OS and 3rd party stuff?
Not without gaining a pretty good knowledge of Windows internals. Once you've been, um, blessed with such a gift, it becomes pretty obvious what's real and what isn't, at least as far as processes and services go.
That's only useful in diagnosing major problems, though. (Like when MSBlaster went around.) And cleaning things out completely is really tough: most malware automagically respawns all of its components unless you manage to remove all of them simultaneously, and I've even seen tricks played with filehandles that can't be closed without rebooting, upon which everything is reinstalled. Generally, I just run Ad-Aware about once a week. Why spend so much time scouring your machine and googling filenames when there's cheap or free software to do it for you?
You're forgetting a few. Mario Sunshine was definitely not Mario 64, but it was a fantastic game in its own right. And if you have three friends, four Game Boys and four link cables, you can't find anything more fun than Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. (Except maybe binge drinking or bong hits.)
Most likely a cop would retest after a few minutes of observation if a person belew a .48 since many wouldn't even be conscience at that level.
Most people would be dead. 50% of the population dies at .4.
This is at least the industry's second major embarrassment in as many years. Anyone remember the leaking capacitors? Widely deploying a new material without first testing it is akin to making major changes to a production piece of software and shipping it as soon as you get it to compile. Worse, even, because hardware isn't so easily "patched," and is much more likely to find its way into systems (i.e. automotive controllers) whose failure can actually kill people. If I were a buyer for an IC manufacturer, Sumitomo would have just earned itself a position atop my "never, ever do business with again" list. What they've done is terrible for their industry, as well as the multitude of other high-tech industries that depend on them.
If the FBI thought like the RIAA, they would destroy all roads in the US, because they facilitate people breaking the speed limit.
Yeah! You know, it was just last week that I got pulled over by the FBI for going 75 in a 60.
There's a big difference. The Diebold and Halloween memos were most likely leaked by people who thought they were doing the public a service. In the case of Diebold, you can't really debate that they weren't. The "whistleblowers" didn't profit at all from their actions, and, most importantly, they weren't elected officials. Call me old-fashioned, but it still turns my stomach to see elected officials displaying a complete disregard for the law, the public good, and what is morally right. Not to mention the damage that they do to the credibility of all politicians in the country with such treachery--even the few honest ones.
Heck, I thought they were going to use the 8cm discs in thier newer products and for it to be a "de facto standard". Looks like they are sticking with solid state.
Discs mean motors, which means shorter battery life. Until portable nuclear reactors are readily available, cartridges make a lot of sense for portable systems.