Normally I hate christian fundamentalist but on this subject I am right with them. Branding people with a number on their body is just plain evil. Perhaps I grew up to close to the holocaust but the only way someone will mark me with a number on my body is with a toetag.
Painlessly inserted? How about removed? A passport no matter how good you can always loose. With an rfid tag imbedded this becomes a lot harder. Does any current goverment want to use this? No probably not.
Then again think of the time when a certain european country started a database with the religion of its citizens and of their parents. And think of the time that passed before its true purpose become known. Can you predict wich kinda goverment we will have in a decade? The US 10 years ago was just getting rid of bush in favor of clinton, the netherlands was all peacefull and quiet with no-one making any political statements that were not Politically correct and politicians getting shot happened elsewhere. (for the non-dutch we had a huge uproar (by dutch standards) when Pim Fortuyn formed his own party and said things that no-one had dared say before but a lot of people were thinking. A openly gay charismatic person with some right wing and some left wing views who looked like he was going to win the election before being killed).
but it ain't my point. Restricting people based on age from certain things is something every civilization has done. Blaming the chinese for that is unfair. This does not make it right in either way. Both the ban on internet or banning based on age. I just wanted to show that in the west we too have things banned for no very good reason.
Anyway I looked at a lot of stories on people eating fugu and all describe it as a once in a lifetime experience. NONE describe it as tasting wonderfull. Or even delicious. Or nice. Or okay. Or like chicken.
Kinda says it all to me. Many things you have to do once in your life and are a life time experience. Ask your mother about your birth. She will probably say it was a once in a lifetime, something she will never forget. An amazing experience. But not something to repeat and certainly not something you would pay for:)
It sound like the fugu and other puffer fish don't make the poison themselves but take it from their food. They are carnivores and eat shellfish and crabs and stuff like that.
Taking poision from your food is nothing special. Caterpillars take poison from the leaves they eat and use it to their own defence or rather their species defence. (the caterpillar who gave the bird a stomach upset is dead but the bird will think twice before eating an other caterpillar like it)
Anyway all they seem to have done is raised some pufu fish on a diet of food with no poison. Hence no poison in the fish. I read on article where someone living near the red sea had noticed the same thing. With the poison depending on where the fish was caught.
Oh and the reason the goverment is carefull is that their is no way to tell wich fish is without poison and wich isn't.
From other articles I read it might however be pointless. Part of the taste is the poison so a fugu without poison would just not taste the same. Kind of like alcoholless beer.
Also eating the fugu in a proper restaurant seems perfectly safe (if expensive) as no deaths have occurered in years. All the deaths related to fugu are because of amateurs preparing the fish.
Only thing I haven't found is someone describing the taste as nice or wonderfoul or even as okay. They al describe it as a unique experience but then so is sliding of the sadle of your bike. Looks like people just eat it for the risk, not the taste. Anyone here ever eat the fish and can tell me if it is really the taste?
BUT Gandhi was fighting a democracy. A country with human rights laws (not very good ones and not always obeyed ones but at least there were laws). A country with a free press.
So the english goverment could not easily get away with gunning down a peacefull protest (not that is wasn't tried) without running a lot of risk of it being found out and it causing a backlash at home. In short the english goverment was tied down and then a peacefull protest can work.
A peacefull sit-in can work if the police officer ordered to break it up doesn't want to use violence (or is under orders not to use violence). If on the other hand he has orders to kill then.... Well we seen it in china a few years ago. Or america during the vietnam riots. Or the segregation riots in the US.
So "Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man." Should really be amended with,"Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man when used against civil man."
And everyone in his company is. MS software has become dominant party because it was available so easily and cheaply (pirated or lend or 1 legal license on 2 pc's).
So why did they then bother with the XP activation when piracy has only benefitted them? Afterall activation didn't stop piracy, cost hard cash to develop and only upset paying customers?
Just because piracy has benefitted MS doesn't mean they like it. In MS ideal world they want every PC to pay a subscription fee to run their DRM software on DRM hardware. Activation was the first attempt. It failed, kinda like how Internet Explorer failed completly for years. (well felt like years).
I am a suspicious bastard when it comes to MS but perhaps XP activation was just a test, not of how to stop pirates but of how paying customers would react. A test to see if the DRM hardware of the future might be accepted or not. As far as I can see XP activation passed with flying colors. People cried for a bit but they all swallowed it. So MS is another babystep closer to their ideal world.
Remember activation didn't have to work. MS is not some game company one step away from bankruptcy. If no-one had paid for XP at all then MS would still be around.
I called it sinister because if my second speculation is true they care more about their marketshare then enforcing their copyright (wich should make anyone actually paying feel kinda cheated). It makes sense if your MS but it is not exactly a nice gesture.
As for the second point. I haven't bought a PC with an MS tax in over a decade and I am hardly alone. Also you can install newer versions of windows on older hardware, just because you got 98 with your pc does not give you the right to install 2000 or XP for free. I know many people personally who did.
If your reasoning holds true after all there wouldn't be all that many pirated versions of windows around.
But apple has a different method. I can't buy an apple without their OS and without their hardware their OS is useless. Windows is far different. Buying a whitebox is trivial (at least where I live) and even cheaper.
Sure the MS tax insures that many people at least start out with legal MS software but if MS figures on piracy are to be believed then they don't stay that way for long.
Are these kids really using the internet to find out the truth (whatever that maybe)? China must have superkids then. The rest of the world just uses the internet for porn and games.
Try freenet for a while. The anonymous P2P network. Very much a tool for freespeech. Allows anyone to post material without fear of being found out. Now try looking at what is actually there. Child porn and copyright infringement and frankly a whole lot of perfectly legal stuff.
Not exactly the kind of stuff Amnesty International is fighting for eh?
If you see the internet as simply a tool for playing games or accesing porn (as china would like to do) then putting an age restriction on it is not that insane. No more insane then an age limit on driving, drinking, smoking or indeed riding a rollercoaster. Kids who raid liquour stores are not freedom fighters.
If the story is true then this plays right into the chinese goverment hands. See the evil internet turns kids into thugs. We must restrict access more!
Street gangs beating up individuals to force them to do what they want? That is not revolution. Revolution is getting the population in with you in, sometimes violent, protest against the goverment and by nature those who defend them, the police and military. But ultimatly all revolutions are successfull only when the police and especially the military join the uprising. This is what happened in france, russia (several times) and of course china itself.
These kids are more closely related to the looters and other proviteers that turn up in times of trouble.
America has got gangs who "protest" the laws on drugs in the US and they use violence too. Are these your revolutionaries? Or just simple criminals?
Don't mistake someone breaking a law for someone protesting a law. I know the world likes to romantize everything but the mafia was not defending the freedom of americans to drink for instance. They were just criminals breaking the law.
protesting the unfair distribution of wealth in a capatalist society or just a criminal who should be locked up?
I think the poster you reacted to is right. These are exactly the kind of people who grow up to be dictators or the tools of dictators. What after all is a dictator? Someone who supresses others with violence and intimidation to get what they want. Exactly what these criminals did.
China has a law. It is a law not many others would agree with but then the US, so called bastion of freedom, has laws many others would not agree with. The previously mentioned ban on cannabis, somewhat legal in say holland and tolerated in most western nations, can get you a long time in jail in america. Would a gang rading a goverment run canabis plantation (for medicinal use) have the same kind of sympathy?
The only things these criminals have achieved is play exactly into the chinese goverment hand. They claim kids can't handle the internet and they have been proven right. After all throwing a fit and beating everyone up is hardly a sign that one is a responsible adult right?
Think of it in the same way as the "keep canabis illegal" crowd who uses every canabis related death as a sign of its evil (while totally forgetting that these deaths pale when compared to say alcohol related deaths).
I am not trying to defend the ban on internet access for minors (despite the bad joke that this would make online games a lot more enjoyable) but these kids are not protesting it. They are no more then any criminal who with violence breaks the law. No serious human rights defender would want to be associated with them.
Or a gba? Nice game machines but they look like cheap bits of plastic. They are toys fun toys but they also look like toys. They are not 3000 dollar laptops. They don't have to be sleek. They have to cheap, cheerfull and robust. So far my gba has survived rather well being carried around in my pocket.
Other have tried with devices far better and with excellent looks, hell anything looks good to the game boy, and all have failed totally. Looks don't matter.
The only thing I find odd about this device is the size of the top screen. Wouldn't there be space for a slightly larger screen? Add maybe 10-20 dollars to the price tag and give peoples eye a break.
The old GBA stood alone but this one is going to be compared the PSP and who likes a small a screen.
The first is simple. MS can't ban them. SP1 was easily installed when you had a keygen. So basically they are allowing something they can't stop anyway.
The second is more sinister. Has MS ever lost from piracy? Or has piracy helped them become the owner of the desktop. If everyone really had to pay for every bit of MS software they ran would they still be so widely used?
If they ever manage to create a windows you can't install without a license people might just choose not to use windows. It is a radical idea I know but MS can't risk it. They can afford piracy, they can't afford losing dominance on the desktop. Hell Gates himself has boasted that MS fortune is big enough to last them years without a single source of income.
Unix was once very popular because it was practially free to everyone working at a university. There were other OS'es to work with but unix was free for students, teachers, researchers and other people with no money. Same with the C programming language.
Dominance is worth a lot more then getting every user to pay. Just ask apple. Apple made sure you had to pay for their OS because you have to buy their hardware. How big is their share again?
I guess it's hard to restrain yourself when somebody is trying to kill you huh
This really applies to both sides and shows you the dillema of all conflicts like this. Where you have two sides who don't want each other. Doesn't matter if it is vietnam, northen ireland, israel and now iraq.
It is very hard after a battle when you buddies been killed and you came close to death and that son of a bitch on the other side has his hands up to not give him a little lesson and teach him not to ever do that again.
Old war movies don't show this but the more recent ones finally show this reality. It is human nature and something that only the most highly trained can overcome, SWAT teams, certainly not regular soldiers. One of the hardest jobs for a police officer is being nice to criminals you are trying to interogate while moments before you where cleaning up their handy work.
And there been plenty of examples of even cops losing it.
So iraq and all those other conflicts has two sides who are escalating in their hatred neither side simply capable of stopping it.
If only we could change human nature so that we could fight a battle and then when it stops calm down and threat the other side humane. Then again if we changed that much we wouldn't have battles in the first place.
Solution, use a really big one if there is space. Or even better the bit that you use to smooth holes you bored in metal. (it indents the hole slightly and removes any jagged edges)
This easily removes tiny screw heads who are either to thight or have a rounded hole.
Just to play F16 falcon. Years ago. Upgraded DOS and my memory. Made a gigantic difference.
Same with upgrading from an adlib to a soundblaster. Gigantic difference.
Again when I inserted a 3Dfx card.
All my upgrades are for games. My work PC is a linux dual P3 that is so ancient the manuals on top have turned to coal.
Hell Doom3 may in fact not require me to upgrade. I already got the hardware for it. Half-Life 2 is another story. I think this pc will have turned to dust by the time that one is actually released.
You know that old "you got the right to remain silent" bit that cops tell you as they cuff you and you fall down the stairs on the way to the cells?
It is good advice, the best advice and the one piece of advice you should always take. DON'T SAY A THING. Let the lawyers talk. They are trained for it and if they are any good they will say the absolute minimum as well.
We have two recent and excellent examples of people who didn't take this bit of advice. Martha Stewart. They didn't get her on her crimes but got her because she didn't keep her mouth shut and lied to cops. A big nono.
The other is of course Darl "Leghorn" McBride himself. Baystar is reclaiming their investment because Darl just can't keep his mouth shut. Baystar is not against the lawsuit, they love the lawsuit, they just want it to be fought out in the courts where there is a change of SCO winning (or at least they like the odds on it) rather then being fought out in the streets and press where SCO is only loosing.
So wishing for IBM to make public statements is like wishing for the CIA to have press annoucements about the deployments of secret agents. Ain't gonna happen.
Story ain't all that good. No really. Try to judge it as a book. Write it down and then read it on paper. It works in the game because frankly we are extremely forgiving when it comes to games. As long there is somekind of plot better then "collect three stones to reforge item X to beat Boss Z" we are gratefull.
But the story is really pretty basic. Amnesia guy fights the baddies but that is all a setup and at the critical point he has to ask himself who he really is. The old baddie or the new goodie. (the movie could hardly have him fall to the darkside, that ain't how hollywood works) Can you say Total Recall?
The side stories ain't much better. If you saw them in a movie or book you would cry "CLICHE" and feel offended.
Anyway anyone who is a fan of the game would already know the story and hardly be intrestted in seeing it again.
So if you make a new story all you are doing is making a new star wars movie. Will that be successfull? Does the pope shit in the woods?
Star Wars the original movies X-wing (space combat game). Worked excellent x-wing killed wing-commander. Who needs cats when you have the empire!
Star Trek Original Series Star Trek 25th aniversery and Judgement rites. Two excellent adventures.
It can work but it needs really carefull work. X-wing worked because it really only used the setting of star wars. You weren't Luke Skywalker or Han Solo but rather one of the many nameless pilots that got killed in the movies.
The star trek adventures are perhaps the most perfect adoption. They played EXACTLY like a tv episode. The only minor point was some extremely pointless space combat shooter element that was thrown in for god knows what reason. The adventure part worked, the space combat bit didn't.
And that really is the lesson. Focus on ONE gametype and realise that certain things just can't be done in games. So far we have had numerous attempts at games that put you on the bridge of the Enterprise in combat and they just don't work.
Will a good movie ever be made based on a game? Well tron is a nice movie. But then it was based on fantasie games, the games in the movie only coming AFTER the movie.
Frankly most games just don't have a universe rich enough to make a game. It is easy to make a shooter out of story but a lot harder to make a story out of shooter. Can anyone really imagine what the plot would be for an ID game?
So I agree with you why it is difficult but it has been done in one direction at least. so movies -> games at least can work.
Geez, I remember being a kid seeing star wars for the first time in the theather and being completly blown away. You probably went, "you can hear a ships engines in space, laser is invisible in a vacuum, etc".
For some reason I think I have a lot more fun in live.
Get a life some of us see movies to be entertained, not to see applied physics.
Your kind was making movies and boring audiences when a guy called George Lucas stepped in and changed movies. He made them fun again. (and then ruined it with episode 1 but that is another story)
Hyperspace is the area through wich you travel by means of a hyperdrive along a route calculated by a shipboard computer or an android like an R2 unit at speeds greater then the speed of light.
Hyperspace travel is a case of pointing in the right direction and hitting your engine. You will then leave this universe and enter hyperspace where time and distance are different but gravity is not. The trick is therefore to make sure there is nothing in your way. Hitting a gravity well while in hyperspace is rumored not to be a good thing.
It is a totally different game then Starwars galaxies. Hell it is totally different from most western games. It is to western games what doom is to half-life.
Korean type games like Lineage, Ragnarok and Priston tales are extremely limited bash-em-ups. Rigid class structure, limited weapons, limited moves. Lineage 2 even stand aparts from the other 2 for allowing, shock and horror, you to CHOOSE your sex, rather then have a sex forced on you based on your class.
Of course Koreans play the games in a totally different way. When you play any game in a real group at a physical location like a cyber cafe a lot of the fun comes not just from the game but from playing against friends you can talk to. It then actually helps if the game ain't to complex or deep as you can chat while your character just bashes away.
Personally I have had absolute blasts at cybercafes playing worms and other ancient titles when I had long since ditched those games when playing at home.
I am not saying I agree totally with the selling of addons when I also have to pay per month but it is not like Star Wars Galaxies is raking in the dough while spending nothing. Any mmorpg of its class costs a hell of a lot to maintain and they got the added burden of the licensing costs. Personally I have a greater problem with me having to pay the same subscription when I play once per week as someone who is logged in 12/7.
Hydrogen has a lot more oomph then a low current. That low current can produce a lot of hydrogen slowly but probably isn't enough to heat up a cooking plate in a few seconds. Certainly nowhere as fast as cooking on hydrogen:)
What I am really wondering about is if this could also be used to refuel your hydrogen powered car. FREE fuel! Now that would make the investment easily pay off.
You give the solution yourselve. Keys. Or keycard or something similar. People know how to use keys. They are easy. You can put them on a ring and then they are all in once place. You can buy little colored bits of plastic to identify identical keys easily.
SSH keys are a dream and make remote admin very easy. As long as your home system ain't to comprimised it is also safe. Bunch of keys on the keyring/agent and off you go.
But this is only for unix users and then on an admin level. Why do the ordinary computers users and windows freaks not have something physical? A key you stick in a holder that takes care of the login?
Well they exist of course. Keycards and similar are nothing new but so far noone seems to have made on that can be cheapily fitted by dell to each PC.
Then again MS tried to do something about all that login trouble. Something called passport? Wonder what happened to it. Oh wait. People didn't want to use it.
Trouble with PC's is that people expect them to do magic without them even waving their magic wand.
Windows is easier cause you can install drivers with 1 click. So you say that your drivers for linux came with the kernel. That is cheating you hippy.
It is like how much easier you can play movies under linux. You get a mediaplayer and hunt down a dozen codecs all of wich conflict. This is much easier then doing that CLI thing of "emerge mplayer/aptget mplayer". All my movies just play under linux. Under windows I get upside down Xvid, missing OGM, missing subs, dubs wich constantly select the wrong language.
Frankly I thought the old "soundcard" trouble had been replaced by "digital camera". Hey, the 20th century called, they want their flamebait back.
I used to work in production in the night shift. Problem is that back then there were only so many radio stations and many of them were CRAP. Endless phone calls prattling on about nothing may be nice for imsomniacs but being put to sleep ain't any good when handling heavy machinery.
So we usually put a tape on. Aftera while you would know exactly wich song come on next. It was so bad that if I heard the song on the radio and it was then followed by a different song it would startle me.
So long live my Nomad Zen and its shuffle. Keeps the playlist intresting.
Braindamaged? Isn't a sign of brain damage that you can't deal with change? Just try upsetting the routine of a down syndrome person and enjoy the fireworks.
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Painlessly inserted? How about removed? A passport no matter how good you can always loose. With an rfid tag imbedded this becomes a lot harder. Does any current goverment want to use this? No probably not.
Then again think of the time when a certain european country started a database with the religion of its citizens and of their parents. And think of the time that passed before its true purpose become known. Can you predict wich kinda goverment we will have in a decade? The US 10 years ago was just getting rid of bush in favor of clinton, the netherlands was all peacefull and quiet with no-one making any political statements that were not Politically correct and politicians getting shot happened elsewhere. (for the non-dutch we had a huge uproar (by dutch standards) when Pim Fortuyn formed his own party and said things that no-one had dared say before but a lot of people were thinking. A openly gay charismatic person with some right wing and some left wing views who looked like he was going to win the election before being killed).
Scary stuff. Anyone that accepts this is insane.
but it ain't my point. Restricting people based on age from certain things is something every civilization has done. Blaming the chinese for that is unfair. This does not make it right in either way. Both the ban on internet or banning based on age. I just wanted to show that in the west we too have things banned for no very good reason.
Anyway I looked at a lot of stories on people eating fugu and all describe it as a once in a lifetime experience. NONE describe it as tasting wonderfull. Or even delicious. Or nice. Or okay. Or like chicken.
Kinda says it all to me. Many things you have to do once in your life and are a life time experience. Ask your mother about your birth. She will probably say it was a once in a lifetime, something she will never forget. An amazing experience. But not something to repeat and certainly not something you would pay for :)
Taking poision from your food is nothing special. Caterpillars take poison from the leaves they eat and use it to their own defence or rather their species defence. (the caterpillar who gave the bird a stomach upset is dead but the bird will think twice before eating an other caterpillar like it)
Anyway all they seem to have done is raised some pufu fish on a diet of food with no poison. Hence no poison in the fish. I read on article where someone living near the red sea had noticed the same thing. With the poison depending on where the fish was caught.
Oh and the reason the goverment is carefull is that their is no way to tell wich fish is without poison and wich isn't.
From other articles I read it might however be pointless. Part of the taste is the poison so a fugu without poison would just not taste the same. Kind of like alcoholless beer.
Also eating the fugu in a proper restaurant seems perfectly safe (if expensive) as no deaths have occurered in years. All the deaths related to fugu are because of amateurs preparing the fish.
Only thing I haven't found is someone describing the taste as nice or wonderfoul or even as okay. They al describe it as a unique experience but then so is sliding of the sadle of your bike. Looks like people just eat it for the risk, not the taste. Anyone here ever eat the fish and can tell me if it is really the taste?
BUT Gandhi was fighting a democracy. A country with human rights laws (not very good ones and not always obeyed ones but at least there were laws). A country with a free press.
So the english goverment could not easily get away with gunning down a peacefull protest (not that is wasn't tried) without running a lot of risk of it being found out and it causing a backlash at home. In short the english goverment was tied down and then a peacefull protest can work.
A peacefull sit-in can work if the police officer ordered to break it up doesn't want to use violence (or is under orders not to use violence). If on the other hand he has orders to kill then.... Well we seen it in china a few years ago. Or america during the vietnam riots. Or the segregation riots in the US.
So "Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man." Should really be amended with,"Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man when used against civil man."
So why did they then bother with the XP activation when piracy has only benefitted them? Afterall activation didn't stop piracy, cost hard cash to develop and only upset paying customers?
Just because piracy has benefitted MS doesn't mean they like it. In MS ideal world they want every PC to pay a subscription fee to run their DRM software on DRM hardware. Activation was the first attempt. It failed, kinda like how Internet Explorer failed completly for years. (well felt like years).
I am a suspicious bastard when it comes to MS but perhaps XP activation was just a test, not of how to stop pirates but of how paying customers would react. A test to see if the DRM hardware of the future might be accepted or not. As far as I can see XP activation passed with flying colors. People cried for a bit but they all swallowed it. So MS is another babystep closer to their ideal world.
Remember activation didn't have to work. MS is not some game company one step away from bankruptcy. If no-one had paid for XP at all then MS would still be around.
As for the second point. I haven't bought a PC with an MS tax in over a decade and I am hardly alone. Also you can install newer versions of windows on older hardware, just because you got 98 with your pc does not give you the right to install 2000 or XP for free. I know many people personally who did.
If your reasoning holds true after all there wouldn't be all that many pirated versions of windows around.
But apple has a different method. I can't buy an apple without their OS and without their hardware their OS is useless. Windows is far different. Buying a whitebox is trivial (at least where I live) and even cheaper.
Sure the MS tax insures that many people at least start out with legal MS software but if MS figures on piracy are to be believed then they don't stay that way for long.
Try freenet for a while. The anonymous P2P network. Very much a tool for freespeech. Allows anyone to post material without fear of being found out. Now try looking at what is actually there. Child porn and copyright infringement and frankly a whole lot of perfectly legal stuff.
Not exactly the kind of stuff Amnesty International is fighting for eh?
If you see the internet as simply a tool for playing games or accesing porn (as china would like to do) then putting an age restriction on it is not that insane. No more insane then an age limit on driving, drinking, smoking or indeed riding a rollercoaster. Kids who raid liquour stores are not freedom fighters.
If the story is true then this plays right into the chinese goverment hands. See the evil internet turns kids into thugs. We must restrict access more!
These kids are more closely related to the looters and other proviteers that turn up in times of trouble.
America has got gangs who "protest" the laws on drugs in the US and they use violence too. Are these your revolutionaries? Or just simple criminals?
Don't mistake someone breaking a law for someone protesting a law. I know the world likes to romantize everything but the mafia was not defending the freedom of americans to drink for instance. They were just criminals breaking the law.
I think the poster you reacted to is right. These are exactly the kind of people who grow up to be dictators or the tools of dictators. What after all is a dictator? Someone who supresses others with violence and intimidation to get what they want. Exactly what these criminals did.
China has a law. It is a law not many others would agree with but then the US, so called bastion of freedom, has laws many others would not agree with. The previously mentioned ban on cannabis, somewhat legal in say holland and tolerated in most western nations, can get you a long time in jail in america. Would a gang rading a goverment run canabis plantation (for medicinal use) have the same kind of sympathy?
The only things these criminals have achieved is play exactly into the chinese goverment hand. They claim kids can't handle the internet and they have been proven right. After all throwing a fit and beating everyone up is hardly a sign that one is a responsible adult right?
Think of it in the same way as the "keep canabis illegal" crowd who uses every canabis related death as a sign of its evil (while totally forgetting that these deaths pale when compared to say alcohol related deaths).
I am not trying to defend the ban on internet access for minors (despite the bad joke that this would make online games a lot more enjoyable) but these kids are not protesting it. They are no more then any criminal who with violence breaks the law. No serious human rights defender would want to be associated with them.
Other have tried with devices far better and with excellent looks, hell anything looks good to the game boy, and all have failed totally. Looks don't matter.
The only thing I find odd about this device is the size of the top screen. Wouldn't there be space for a slightly larger screen? Add maybe 10-20 dollars to the price tag and give peoples eye a break.
The old GBA stood alone but this one is going to be compared the PSP and who likes a small a screen.
The first is simple. MS can't ban them. SP1 was easily installed when you had a keygen. So basically they are allowing something they can't stop anyway.
The second is more sinister. Has MS ever lost from piracy? Or has piracy helped them become the owner of the desktop. If everyone really had to pay for every bit of MS software they ran would they still be so widely used?
If they ever manage to create a windows you can't install without a license people might just choose not to use windows. It is a radical idea I know but MS can't risk it. They can afford piracy, they can't afford losing dominance on the desktop. Hell Gates himself has boasted that MS fortune is big enough to last them years without a single source of income.
Unix was once very popular because it was practially free to everyone working at a university. There were other OS'es to work with but unix was free for students, teachers, researchers and other people with no money. Same with the C programming language.
Dominance is worth a lot more then getting every user to pay. Just ask apple. Apple made sure you had to pay for their OS because you have to buy their hardware. How big is their share again?
This really applies to both sides and shows you the dillema of all conflicts like this. Where you have two sides who don't want each other. Doesn't matter if it is vietnam, northen ireland, israel and now iraq.
It is very hard after a battle when you buddies been killed and you came close to death and that son of a bitch on the other side has his hands up to not give him a little lesson and teach him not to ever do that again.
Old war movies don't show this but the more recent ones finally show this reality. It is human nature and something that only the most highly trained can overcome, SWAT teams, certainly not regular soldiers. One of the hardest jobs for a police officer is being nice to criminals you are trying to interogate while moments before you where cleaning up their handy work.
And there been plenty of examples of even cops losing it.
So iraq and all those other conflicts has two sides who are escalating in their hatred neither side simply capable of stopping it.
If only we could change human nature so that we could fight a battle and then when it stops calm down and threat the other side humane. Then again if we changed that much we wouldn't have battles in the first place.
This easily removes tiny screw heads who are either to thight or have a rounded hole.
Same with upgrading from an adlib to a soundblaster. Gigantic difference.
Again when I inserted a 3Dfx card.
All my upgrades are for games. My work PC is a linux dual P3 that is so ancient the manuals on top have turned to coal.
Hell Doom3 may in fact not require me to upgrade. I already got the hardware for it. Half-Life 2 is another story. I think this pc will have turned to dust by the time that one is actually released.
It is good advice, the best advice and the one piece of advice you should always take. DON'T SAY A THING. Let the lawyers talk. They are trained for it and if they are any good they will say the absolute minimum as well.
We have two recent and excellent examples of people who didn't take this bit of advice. Martha Stewart. They didn't get her on her crimes but got her because she didn't keep her mouth shut and lied to cops. A big nono.
The other is of course Darl "Leghorn" McBride himself. Baystar is reclaiming their investment because Darl just can't keep his mouth shut. Baystar is not against the lawsuit, they love the lawsuit, they just want it to be fought out in the courts where there is a change of SCO winning (or at least they like the odds on it) rather then being fought out in the streets and press where SCO is only loosing.
So wishing for IBM to make public statements is like wishing for the CIA to have press annoucements about the deployments of secret agents. Ain't gonna happen.
But the story is really pretty basic. Amnesia guy fights the baddies but that is all a setup and at the critical point he has to ask himself who he really is. The old baddie or the new goodie. (the movie could hardly have him fall to the darkside, that ain't how hollywood works) Can you say Total Recall?
The side stories ain't much better. If you saw them in a movie or book you would cry "CLICHE" and feel offended.
Anyway anyone who is a fan of the game would already know the story and hardly be intrestted in seeing it again.
So if you make a new story all you are doing is making a new star wars movie. Will that be successfull? Does the pope shit in the woods?
Star Trek Original Series Star Trek 25th aniversery and Judgement rites. Two excellent adventures.
It can work but it needs really carefull work. X-wing worked because it really only used the setting of star wars. You weren't Luke Skywalker or Han Solo but rather one of the many nameless pilots that got killed in the movies.
The star trek adventures are perhaps the most perfect adoption. They played EXACTLY like a tv episode. The only minor point was some extremely pointless space combat shooter element that was thrown in for god knows what reason. The adventure part worked, the space combat bit didn't.
And that really is the lesson. Focus on ONE gametype and realise that certain things just can't be done in games. So far we have had numerous attempts at games that put you on the bridge of the Enterprise in combat and they just don't work.
Will a good movie ever be made based on a game? Well tron is a nice movie. But then it was based on fantasie games, the games in the movie only coming AFTER the movie.
Frankly most games just don't have a universe rich enough to make a game. It is easy to make a shooter out of story but a lot harder to make a story out of shooter. Can anyone really imagine what the plot would be for an ID game?
So I agree with you why it is difficult but it has been done in one direction at least. so movies -> games at least can work.
For some reason I think I have a lot more fun in live.
Get a life some of us see movies to be entertained, not to see applied physics.
Your kind was making movies and boring audiences when a guy called George Lucas stepped in and changed movies. He made them fun again. (and then ruined it with episode 1 but that is another story)
Hyperspace travel is a case of pointing in the right direction and hitting your engine. You will then leave this universe and enter hyperspace where time and distance are different but gravity is not. The trick is therefore to make sure there is nothing in your way. Hitting a gravity well while in hyperspace is rumored not to be a good thing.
Why yes I am single. How did you guess?
Korean type games like Lineage, Ragnarok and Priston tales are extremely limited bash-em-ups. Rigid class structure, limited weapons, limited moves. Lineage 2 even stand aparts from the other 2 for allowing, shock and horror, you to CHOOSE your sex, rather then have a sex forced on you based on your class.
Of course Koreans play the games in a totally different way. When you play any game in a real group at a physical location like a cyber cafe a lot of the fun comes not just from the game but from playing against friends you can talk to. It then actually helps if the game ain't to complex or deep as you can chat while your character just bashes away.
Personally I have had absolute blasts at cybercafes playing worms and other ancient titles when I had long since ditched those games when playing at home.
I am not saying I agree totally with the selling of addons when I also have to pay per month but it is not like Star Wars Galaxies is raking in the dough while spending nothing. Any mmorpg of its class costs a hell of a lot to maintain and they got the added burden of the licensing costs. Personally I have a greater problem with me having to pay the same subscription when I play once per week as someone who is logged in 12/7.
What I am really wondering about is if this could also be used to refuel your hydrogen powered car. FREE fuel! Now that would make the investment easily pay off.
SSH keys are a dream and make remote admin very easy. As long as your home system ain't to comprimised it is also safe. Bunch of keys on the keyring/agent and off you go.
But this is only for unix users and then on an admin level. Why do the ordinary computers users and windows freaks not have something physical? A key you stick in a holder that takes care of the login?
Well they exist of course. Keycards and similar are nothing new but so far noone seems to have made on that can be cheapily fitted by dell to each PC.
Then again MS tried to do something about all that login trouble. Something called passport? Wonder what happened to it. Oh wait. People didn't want to use it.
Trouble with PC's is that people expect them to do magic without them even waving their magic wand.
It is like how much easier you can play movies under linux. You get a mediaplayer and hunt down a dozen codecs all of wich conflict. This is much easier then doing that CLI thing of "emerge mplayer/aptget mplayer". All my movies just play under linux. Under windows I get upside down Xvid, missing OGM, missing subs, dubs wich constantly select the wrong language.
Frankly I thought the old "soundcard" trouble had been replaced by "digital camera". Hey, the 20th century called, they want their flamebait back.
So we usually put a tape on. Aftera while you would know exactly wich song come on next. It was so bad that if I heard the song on the radio and it was then followed by a different song it would startle me.
So long live my Nomad Zen and its shuffle. Keeps the playlist intresting.
Braindamaged? Isn't a sign of brain damage that you can't deal with change? Just try upsetting the routine of a down syndrome person and enjoy the fireworks.