that's about the weakest attack on I.D. that I've heared
Why, it's Vice-President Cletus I do believe.
Your grammar and spelling are possible explained by this: I've been to a number of sermons of differnt christian sects
I think it's a very good argument. Why should the church intrude into science by arguing that the tenets of science demand equal attention for religious theories, but science may not intrude into the church by demanding that faith can support many things, including rationality, deduction and provable theories?
Excuse the capitalisation, but there are two parts of the world that have these sorts of problems.
1. Nutbag developing world theocracies: Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia 2. The United States of America
I would say on recent form I would rather have my education system run by the average developing nation than the USA. At least the China-Japan textbook dispute, for example, is easily understood in terms of racial and historical tensions. They're not, for example, trying outlaw logic and reason.
Seriously guys. The joke's over. OVER. We're all getting very, very afraid of you. I'm starting to be a lot more comfortable with the notion that China and India may soon be superpowers. I'm actually *glad* Russia still has a massive arsenal of nukes: Putin may be a dictator-by-proxy, but AT LEAST HE'S NOT INSANE.
Since the end of the Clinton era: - fundamentalists have begun winding back your education system to around the 700-800AD mark - 'faith based' programs have become legitimate government policy - it has become abundantly clear that the Whitehouse is controlled by a man who does not understand science but does fervently believe in a very particular type of capital-G God - you have waged war on two moslem nations - religious voters have become the dominant force in national US politics - Americans have apparently accepted on faith the ridiculous argument that there is 'no evidence' of global warming - America has closer ties to other religious-fundamentalist states (e.g. Israel, Saudi Arabia) than it's secular, liberal-democratic former allies in 'old europe'
Now all this would be fine, except that the religious nutcases that seem to have taken over your country are made incredibly powerful by... why yes, by SCIENCE. That logical, agnostic, provable, testable system we all know and love. Well, those of us outside the US know and love, anyway. SCIENCE has made you rich. SCIENCE has made you powerful. SCIENCE has, unfortunately, given you the weapons to destroy the entire world or precisely targetted bits thereof at the press of a button. Could stealth bombers fly from Missouri to any point on the globe and deliver laser guided bombs based on the teachings of Christ? Why, no - that would be SCIENCE we have to thank for that.
Let us take, as a comparison, Italy. A very religious country, by all accounts, rabid devotion to the Vatican, everyone in sight attending church regularly. Yet the Pope effectively outlaws contraception, but Italy's birth rate is startlingly low. Why? Perhaps Italians are so religious that they really do what they're told? Or perhaps Italians are religious but they understand the difference between faith and allegory on the one hand, and logic and reason on the other. They're not noted for their chaste ways, in any event, and I'm sure Durex and Ansell make hefty sales over there.
So how about we cut a deal? I'll even give you two choices.
1. You let your country go back to theocratic-totalitarianism, by all means. Hound down anyone who uses logic and reason to explain the world. Only, hand over everything that's been developed with science before you do so. Give up all those wonder drugs, all your DVD players that allow you to watch 'The Passion of the Christ', all your giant auditoriums with 100 metre high video screens where you go along to sing your Christian songs. We'll look after them in 'old europe' and the antipodes if you like, and you can burn each other at the stake until the cows come home (only the cows will probably be dead because you rely on science for farming these days).
2. You forget the dogmatic crap and listen to the parts of the bible that actually matter, such as *turn the other fucking cheek, *do unto others, *beams and motes, *the good samaritan, *the FUCKING MONEYLENDERS IN THE TEMPLE YOU STUPID FUCKS. FUUUUUUUUUUCKKK!!!!!!!!!
And if you're not a religious nutcase but you are in the U.S., don't fucking apologise. DO SOMETHING. You are to blame for letting these rabid fundamentalists take over. YOU have to stop them.
Ok, I'll now be modded into oblivion, but I feel slightly better.
####THIS POST BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE WONDERS OF SCIENCE####
So you're assertion is, in summary, that any theory, idea, or fairy tale that can't be disproved immediately has equal validity to any theory based on observable phenomena and deduction?
true science is the scrutiny of all possibilities of that which we do not know
I think this is highly debatable. If we took this approach we may as well use random guesses to explain things, because a guess is a 'possibility' in the sense that you describe. And by the way, starting your post with "Wrong." just makes you look dogmatic, not open minded.
As for the 'first instant of life' argument - do you therefore dismiss gravity because you can't explain the 'first instant of gravity'?
Unlike say, Bahrain, which had wonderful scenery involving a lot of sand. Or Malaysia, where the scenery was wonderful, just obscured by smog. Or Silverstone, which has the ugliest scenery in the world - England, and a whole lot of English people.
Ok, so I'm being defensive. But Adelaide is actually quite attractive.
How, pray tell, is the benevolent Apple "fighting for the rest of us"?
At $1.80 per song I can get most music on a physical CD for the same price or less at a range of Australian shops - e.g. K-Mart, JB Hi-Fi, even Myers, and of course much overlooked independent music retailers. As others have pointed out, Apple and ARIA can just split $1.80 pure profit (less hosting costs, which are surely negligable) for each song sold - no need to employ people in a retail store, no need to pay for physical packaging and pressing, no need to leave the confines of our wired up nerd-dungeons to obtain music.
Yes indeed, we are truly blessed to be thusly liberated.
Now if Apple was to charge, say, 40 cents per song you might be more justified in singing their praises. But for the jillionth time, and I expect to get modded down for this, APPLE ARE A COMPANY WHO WANT TO MAKE MONEY, NOT MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE.
Through a pair of $30 Sony earbud headphones the difference between 128 and 320kbps is painfully obvious. If you invest in a decent set of headphones ($100-200) there are few sets of speakers on the market that will compare to the sound quality. With all due respect if you think the sound quality through headphones is 'so bad' maybe it's your ears that are masking the quality loss at lower bitrates.
All four of you are wrong. Well, not necessarily but I thought I'd continue the theme.
Anyway, moral rights are on the rise irrespective of free speech issues. Moral rights originate in the European school of intellectual property rights, which is more concerned with protecting the author's rights as a way of encouraging creativity. The Anglo-American view of IP has traditionally been more focused on IP as a commodity and encouraging creativity through creating commercial value in the resulting works (i.e. making them tradeable).
Under WIPO and various other international instruments, however, limited moral rights now reflect the European view in a system that is largely built around the Anglo-American view. This is interesting because the concept that there is some nexus between the author and the work in question actually comes back to a fundamental question of art, i.e. is it the art itself or the process of creation that is significant?
Philosophical issues aside, it will increasingly be the case in developed countries that the *author* of a work retains certain inalienable rights with respect to that work, irrespective of who buys and sells what to whom. For instance, authors will retain rights against derogatory treatment of their work, no matter who owns it.
And I must say I tend to agree with the great-great-great-grandparent that free speech should ultimately trump these rights. But that's just an opinion, not what's actually happening.
What will the situation be with older films? Many excellent movies are not available in a digitised form, and we may be at the mercy of the film studios as to when, if ever, they are re-released in a format that these projectors can play.
5. Don't target your advertising at pretentious wannabes using silhouettes of idiots dancing to world music so that people who don't want to look like fashion victims will still consider using one
6. Don't package it with shitty proprietary software that automatically sends you to buy music from the same company that makes the hardware and installs multiple useless services that run all the time in Windows XP
I think we're starting to get to quite a decent little MP3/MP4 player between us...
1. that you can protect a scent in some circumstances; and
2. that generic drugs are not automatically free from intellectual property constraints, and may infringe patents for the manufacture process or the specific action of the drug.
You can actually protect style and aesthetics to a certain extent. It depends on the jurisdiction, but in many countries there is intellectual properties in designs, as opposed to patented methods or copyrighted works. In Australia, for instance, the rip-off iPod would clearly breach rights in Apple's shuffle design, assuming they were validly registered etc., not because of the similar functionality but because of the identical aesthetics.
Furthermore, Apple may have an action for 'passing off' in that this company is clearly trying to ride on Apple's market reputation to sell their own product through the name, advertising and styling of the device. This is an illicit subversion of Apple's goodwill and they will be able to take action on this basis in most countries.
Finally, if the allegations about asian tech manufacturers and Apple's partners prove true, there will very likely be an action in contract or equity against any company that has participated in sharing the technology used in the Shuffle for this device.
That is the legal position. My OPINION, however, is that Apple deserve to get screwed over because this new device looks as good and has better functionality than the Shuffle. Plus it is refreshing to see that you don't have to have the Godly powers of Steve Jobs in your fingertips to produce the same hardware at the same (or lower, presumably) price.
Can anyone else not believe that this will be opening Cannes? Do the French just have a very strange sense of humour, or do they perhaps intend to get revenge for recent US foreign policy decisions by allowing Lucas to make Hollywood look utterly ridiculous in the most public way they can?
Anyone know if there's a gamecube release of KD planned? It seems like a natural Nintendo game, when I first saw it I assumed it was actually on the cube.
Things should get really interesting here. As I understand it, Airbus and the European aerospace industry in general has been gradually overtaking Boeing and the US industry for a decade or more now. This plane is sort of symbolic - after 40-odd years as the only game in town, the 747 is suddenly no longer the biggest passenger plane suitable for regular use.
This seems to be just another chapter in a gradually emerging rivalry between the EU and the US. Other chapters have included: - the great banana and steel trade war - Freedom Fries vs french fries - the EU vs Microsoft - Germany and France vs the US over Iraq (although that may have had something to do with sanity vs idiocy too) - the Euro vs the Dollar, especially in major oil and currency markets - snooty French people vs loutish American tourists - the new european GPS equivalent (Magellan?) vs GPS - everyone on Earth lead by the EU vs the US over Kyoto - the european vs US approach to Israel and the Middle East - increasing secularism (EU, see for example banning of headscarves) vs increasing evangelicalism (US/Jesusland)
Anyway, all this adds up to something quite interesting over the next 20-50 years. We have one very old, very industrialised bloc of about 500 million people who have finally decided to stop killing each other for the first time in history and cooperate. Across the atlantic we have 250 million odd people who have been undisputed leaders of the world for several decades now. Other factors of great interest include the massive US military budget compared to Europe's relatively small one, and the big question of who will adapt better to a world without oil and with a powerful China and India in it.
Named after its country of origin 'England', English is a little known dialect used by up to 1.5 billion non-Americans worldwide. Some interesting but obviously incorrect features of the language include:
- queues of people
- wonderful coloUrs
- the useful metal aluminiUm
- the exotic herbs (h-urbs), basil (ba-zil) and oregano (o-re-gaa-no)
- specialiSed books called 'dictionaries' that tell you how to spell words correctly
Many people using this bizarre gutter speak also subscribe to the pagan belief that water freezes at 0 degrees and that distances should be measured in the forbidden mathematical system of base-10...
If it weren't for access via the net I never would have forked out $70 (Australian) per season for Futurama, or a bit less per season for Family Guy, Aqua Teen Hunger Force and so on.
Riddle me this, TV execs: why, when I *could* just stick with downloading from BitTorrent, have I gone out and purchased every season of the X-Files, Futurama and the Simpsons? Answer: because once I have choice and flexibility (e.g. DVDs, which I can watch any time), I don't actually WANT to pirate this stuff, I want to pay for it at a reasonable rate and own it in a flexible form. However, with no DVDs and in some cases no access to TV broadcasts, I am left with the choice of not watching your wonderful (ahem) shows, or committing heinous crimes against humanity by downloading the odd episode.
If you are really serious about peace-loving nations not working together with more aggressive nations then america would be in total isolation right now.
Yeah... imagine that.
The funniest part of the pre-election debates was when Bush reminded Kerry that POLAND was in the coalition before the Iraq invasion. As John Stewart said, when Poland is third on your list after the US and UK then you have serious problems.
If they send a nuke or two over then it is just delayed justice and really no different then America invading Iraq
This has got to be the silliest thing I've read in a long time. No genuine notion of justice can encompass 'an eye for an eye' over a period of 60 years between the original offence and the meting out of retribution. Assuming that this kind of revenge-justice were valid (I stronly suggest to you that it is not), why should a 30 year old Japanese die for something Emperor Hirohito oversaw in 1944?
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind... or in this case, makes the whole world a pile of radioactive ashes.
Re:Not as good as the oldies....
on
Halo 2 Reviews
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· Score: 1
I thought most gamers would have learnt that by now
Oh, they have, they have. Most gamers I know would rather play Quake III than Doom III, for instance - and would probably STILL rather play Doom II than Halo.
IMHO Halo 1 was very, very average on both console and PC. It's one big drawcard, vehicles, was very soon overtaken by Tribes, UT2004, and about a jillion WWII games. It's enemies were boring and repetitive, it's main character characterless, and its storyline basically just a series of linear 'flip the switch' objectives. And in terms of pure gameplay, it was never even in the running, even compared to the original UT and Q3.
But we're not talking about gamers. We're talking about X-Box owners...:P
I have looked at both. I am what you would call a 'power user' if you wrote for a shitty computer magazine, and frankly neither the iBook or iMac comes close to what I demand from a desktop.
The only Macs that would compete with my current PC would be the G5-based monsters at the deep and of the range and the newest Powerbooks, and they are just waaaay too expensive to consider.
PS2 is the cruddiest of the current gaming technology still on the market. Bad frame rates, poor textures, bad (IMHO) controls... it stinks, it stinks, it stinks. Yeeees Mr Sherman, eeeverything stinks.
Sure, I'll get a 'cheap' Mac. In the year 2100. I want a Mac, but every time I look at the prices I can't bring myself to abandon good old cheap, fast AMD.
An interesting question is, WHY should gamers switch to linux/Mac? For once the major criticisms levelled at Windows/x86 (often with some justification) seem to bounce back as strong arguments for why a Windows PC is the best option for games by a country mile:
- bad at multitasking: I have one task, blasting hell knights in 3D
- controlled by evil Windoze Empire (tm): good, so the Evil Windoze Empire will make sure I have up to date drivers and a relatively good 3D API to run my games with for the widest possible range of gaming hardware
- boring beige boxes and huge market of faceless south-east asian technology clones: excellent, excellent. The priority is surely on getting the fastest technology at the best price as soon as possible, rather than longevity or overall build quality (although arguably that comes through careful component choice). But the average gaming rig is good for about 2 years of cutting edge games, tops, so it's really more important that the price is good and the market highly dynamic rather than everything being perfectly reliable
On the other hand, the key strengths of Mac and Linux are not so important for games.
E.g. Mac:
- border of LCD screen is artistically colour-neutral to allow perfect visual reproduction of colours on-screen (no shit, this is what it says on the Apple website, and yes, I'm being facetious but the point is, Mac features are clearly pitched at the graphic design/artiste market and people who colour coordinate their entire lives)
- entire computer can be crammed into a very small, white rectangle: well, that's bad for upgrading every 6-12 months, bad for cooling, and makes serious competition for upgrade components etc pretty unlikely. But it saves desk space and looks cool, not priorities for the average gamer (yes, case modding is supposed to be 'cool', but you know what I mean, how many case modders build beautiful white objects rather than glowing neon monstrosities?).
- computer is 'lifestyle' accessory: people who play Doom III typically have no discernable lifestyle other than cramming cheese doodles into their already-Mountain-Dew-filled maws and occasionally leaving to sleep or ablute
E.g. Linux:
- it's free: I'm springing $2000 for a games PC and $50 for every game... I think $200 for Windows is not too much of a stretch. Alternatively, I steal everything including the game, Windows, and possibly the PC if I've played too much GTA. Either way, not a big factor.
- run by a horde of nerds who all make up their own standards then engage in massive and endless wars about whose is the gre@test 3733t way of doing things: refer to Evil Windoze scenario above, or search./ for 'BSD' or 'Gnome AND KDE' for more details.
- most useful features hidden through inherent 'security' though obscurity (i.e. most non-programmer types can't run xclock, let alone install and configure Doom III): su>ors when U just wanna kill something
Anyway, just my thoughts. I see no real reason why people should be encouraged to move away from Win/x86 just to play games, other than the usual 'Bill Gates is satan' reasons.
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that's about the weakest attack on I.D. that I've heared
Why, it's Vice-President Cletus I do believe.
Your grammar and spelling are possible explained by this: I've been to a number of sermons of differnt christian sects
I think it's a very good argument. Why should the church intrude into science by arguing that the tenets of science demand equal attention for religious theories, but science may not intrude into the church by demanding that faith can support many things, including rationality, deduction and provable theories?
Excuse the capitalisation, but there are two parts of the world that have these sorts of problems.
1. Nutbag developing world theocracies: Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia
2. The United States of America
I would say on recent form I would rather have my education system run by the average developing nation than the USA. At least the China-Japan textbook dispute, for example, is easily understood in terms of racial and historical tensions. They're not, for example, trying outlaw logic and reason.
Seriously guys. The joke's over. OVER. We're all getting very, very afraid of you. I'm starting to be a lot more comfortable with the notion that China and India may soon be superpowers. I'm actually *glad* Russia still has a massive arsenal of nukes: Putin may be a dictator-by-proxy, but AT LEAST HE'S NOT INSANE.
Since the end of the Clinton era:
- fundamentalists have begun winding back your education system to around the 700-800AD mark
- 'faith based' programs have become legitimate government policy
- it has become abundantly clear that the Whitehouse is controlled by a man who does not understand science but does fervently believe in a very particular type of capital-G God
- you have waged war on two moslem nations
- religious voters have become the dominant force in national US politics
- Americans have apparently accepted on faith the ridiculous argument that there is 'no evidence' of global warming
- America has closer ties to other religious-fundamentalist states (e.g. Israel, Saudi Arabia) than it's secular, liberal-democratic former allies in 'old europe'
Now all this would be fine, except that the religious nutcases that seem to have taken over your country are made incredibly powerful by... why yes, by SCIENCE. That logical, agnostic, provable, testable system we all know and love. Well, those of us outside the US know and love, anyway. SCIENCE has made you rich. SCIENCE has made you powerful. SCIENCE has, unfortunately, given you the weapons to destroy the entire world or precisely targetted bits thereof at the press of a button. Could stealth bombers fly from Missouri to any point on the globe and deliver laser guided bombs based on the teachings of Christ? Why, no - that would be SCIENCE we have to thank for that.
Let us take, as a comparison, Italy. A very religious country, by all accounts, rabid devotion to the Vatican, everyone in sight attending church regularly. Yet the Pope effectively outlaws contraception, but Italy's birth rate is startlingly low. Why? Perhaps Italians are so religious that they really do what they're told? Or perhaps Italians are religious but they understand the difference between faith and allegory on the one hand, and logic and reason on the other. They're not noted for their chaste ways, in any event, and I'm sure Durex and Ansell make hefty sales over there.
So how about we cut a deal? I'll even give you two choices.
1. You let your country go back to theocratic-totalitarianism, by all means. Hound down anyone who uses logic and reason to explain the world. Only, hand over everything that's been developed with science before you do so. Give up all those wonder drugs, all your DVD players that allow you to watch 'The Passion of the Christ', all your giant auditoriums with 100 metre high video screens where you go along to sing your Christian songs. We'll look after them in 'old europe' and the antipodes if you like, and you can burn each other at the stake until the cows come home (only the cows will probably be dead because you rely on science for farming these days).
2. You forget the dogmatic crap and listen to the parts of the bible that actually matter, such as *turn the other fucking cheek, *do unto others, *beams and motes, *the good samaritan, *the FUCKING MONEYLENDERS IN THE TEMPLE YOU STUPID FUCKS. FUUUUUUUUUUCKKK!!!!!!!!!
And if you're not a religious nutcase but you are in the U.S., don't fucking apologise. DO SOMETHING. You are to blame for letting these rabid fundamentalists take over. YOU have to stop them.
Ok, I'll now be modded into oblivion, but I feel slightly better.
####THIS POST BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE WONDERS OF SCIENCE####
So you're assertion is, in summary, that any theory, idea, or fairy tale that can't be disproved immediately has equal validity to any theory based on observable phenomena and deduction?
true science is the scrutiny of all possibilities of that which we do not know
I think this is highly debatable. If we took this approach we may as well use random guesses to explain things, because a guess is a 'possibility' in the sense that you describe. And by the way, starting your post with "Wrong." just makes you look dogmatic, not open minded.
As for the 'first instant of life' argument - do you therefore dismiss gravity because you can't explain the 'first instant of gravity'?
Your ignorance is easily explained: "...I live in Sydney..."
Go and relax by the pewell.
Q: How good is that place?
A: Very very good.
Beats the hell out of Cibo, and waaay better than Gloria Jeans/Hudsons/whatever.
Unlike say, Bahrain, which had wonderful scenery involving a lot of sand. Or Malaysia, where the scenery was wonderful, just obscured by smog. Or Silverstone, which has the ugliest scenery in the world - England, and a whole lot of English people.
Ok, so I'm being defensive. But Adelaide is actually quite attractive.
But he did write a song about it, called 'Adelaide'. He now lives in Nashville.
How, pray tell, is the benevolent Apple "fighting for the rest of us"?
At $1.80 per song I can get most music on a physical CD for the same price or less at a range of Australian shops - e.g. K-Mart, JB Hi-Fi, even Myers, and of course much overlooked independent music retailers. As others have pointed out, Apple and ARIA can just split $1.80 pure profit (less hosting costs, which are surely negligable) for each song sold - no need to employ people in a retail store, no need to pay for physical packaging and pressing, no need to leave the confines of our wired up nerd-dungeons to obtain music.
Yes indeed, we are truly blessed to be thusly liberated.
Now if Apple was to charge, say, 40 cents per song you might be more justified in singing their praises. But for the jillionth time, and I expect to get modded down for this, APPLE ARE A COMPANY WHO WANT TO MAKE MONEY, NOT MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE.
Through a pair of $30 Sony earbud headphones the difference between 128 and 320kbps is painfully obvious. If you invest in a decent set of headphones ($100-200) there are few sets of speakers on the market that will compare to the sound quality. With all due respect if you think the sound quality through headphones is 'so bad' maybe it's your ears that are masking the quality loss at lower bitrates.
All four of you are wrong. Well, not necessarily but I thought I'd continue the theme.
Anyway, moral rights are on the rise irrespective of free speech issues. Moral rights originate in the European school of intellectual property rights, which is more concerned with protecting the author's rights as a way of encouraging creativity. The Anglo-American view of IP has traditionally been more focused on IP as a commodity and encouraging creativity through creating commercial value in the resulting works (i.e. making them tradeable).
Under WIPO and various other international instruments, however, limited moral rights now reflect the European view in a system that is largely built around the Anglo-American view. This is interesting because the concept that there is some nexus between the author and the work in question actually comes back to a fundamental question of art, i.e. is it the art itself or the process of creation that is significant?
Philosophical issues aside, it will increasingly be the case in developed countries that the *author* of a work retains certain inalienable rights with respect to that work, irrespective of who buys and sells what to whom. For instance, authors will retain rights against derogatory treatment of their work, no matter who owns it.
And I must say I tend to agree with the great-great-great-grandparent that free speech should ultimately trump these rights. But that's just an opinion, not what's actually happening.
What will the situation be with older films? Many excellent movies are not available in a digitised form, and we may be at the mercy of the film studios as to when, if ever, they are re-released in a format that these projectors can play.
4. Don't call it 'Shuffle'
5. Don't target your advertising at pretentious wannabes using silhouettes of idiots dancing to world music so that people who don't want to look like fashion victims will still consider using one
6. Don't package it with shitty proprietary software that automatically sends you to buy music from the same company that makes the hardware and installs multiple useless services that run all the time in Windows XP
I think we're starting to get to quite a decent little MP3/MP4 player between us...
in response to the grandparent that:
1. that you can protect a scent in some circumstances; and
2. that generic drugs are not automatically free from intellectual property constraints, and may infringe patents for the manufacture process or the specific action of the drug.
IAAL and...
You can actually protect style and aesthetics to a certain extent. It depends on the jurisdiction, but in many countries there is intellectual properties in designs, as opposed to patented methods or copyrighted works. In Australia, for instance, the rip-off iPod would clearly breach rights in Apple's shuffle design, assuming they were validly registered etc., not because of the similar functionality but because of the identical aesthetics.
Furthermore, Apple may have an action for 'passing off' in that this company is clearly trying to ride on Apple's market reputation to sell their own product through the name, advertising and styling of the device. This is an illicit subversion of Apple's goodwill and they will be able to take action on this basis in most countries.
Finally, if the allegations about asian tech manufacturers and Apple's partners prove true, there will very likely be an action in contract or equity against any company that has participated in sharing the technology used in the Shuffle for this device.
That is the legal position. My OPINION, however, is that Apple deserve to get screwed over because this new device looks as good and has better functionality than the Shuffle. Plus it is refreshing to see that you don't have to have the Godly powers of Steve Jobs in your fingertips to produce the same hardware at the same (or lower, presumably) price.
Can anyone else not believe that this will be opening Cannes? Do the French just have a very strange sense of humour, or do they perhaps intend to get revenge for recent US foreign policy decisions by allowing Lucas to make Hollywood look utterly ridiculous in the most public way they can?
Anyone know if there's a gamecube release of KD planned? It seems like a natural Nintendo game, when I first saw it I assumed it was actually on the cube.
Things should get really interesting here. As I understand it, Airbus and the European aerospace industry in general has been gradually overtaking Boeing and the US industry for a decade or more now. This plane is sort of symbolic - after 40-odd years as the only game in town, the 747 is suddenly no longer the biggest passenger plane suitable for regular use.
This seems to be just another chapter in a gradually emerging rivalry between the EU and the US. Other chapters have included:
- the great banana and steel trade war
- Freedom Fries vs french fries
- the EU vs Microsoft
- Germany and France vs the US over Iraq (although that may have had something to do with sanity vs idiocy too)
- the Euro vs the Dollar, especially in major oil and currency markets
- snooty French people vs loutish American tourists
- the new european GPS equivalent (Magellan?) vs GPS
- everyone on Earth lead by the EU vs the US over Kyoto
- the european vs US approach to Israel and the Middle East
- increasing secularism (EU, see for example banning of headscarves) vs increasing evangelicalism (US/Jesusland)
Anyway, all this adds up to something quite interesting over the next 20-50 years. We have one very old, very industrialised bloc of about 500 million people who have finally decided to stop killing each other for the first time in history and cooperate. Across the atlantic we have 250 million odd people who have been undisputed leaders of the world for several decades now. Other factors of great interest include the massive US military budget compared to Europe's relatively small one, and the big question of who will adapt better to a world without oil and with a powerful China and India in it.
Named after its country of origin 'England', English is a little known dialect used by up to 1.5 billion non-Americans worldwide. Some interesting but obviously incorrect features of the language include:
- queues of people
- wonderful coloUrs
- the useful metal aluminiUm
- the exotic herbs (h-urbs), basil (ba-zil) and oregano (o-re-gaa-no)
- specialiSed books called 'dictionaries' that tell you how to spell words correctly
Many people using this bizarre gutter speak also subscribe to the pagan belief that water freezes at 0 degrees and that distances should be measured in the forbidden mathematical system of base-10...
I think your point makes an excellent point.
If it weren't for access via the net I never would have forked out $70 (Australian) per season for Futurama, or a bit less per season for Family Guy, Aqua Teen Hunger Force and so on.
Riddle me this, TV execs: why, when I *could* just stick with downloading from BitTorrent, have I gone out and purchased every season of the X-Files, Futurama and the Simpsons? Answer: because once I have choice and flexibility (e.g. DVDs, which I can watch any time), I don't actually WANT to pirate this stuff, I want to pay for it at a reasonable rate and own it in a flexible form. However, with no DVDs and in some cases no access to TV broadcasts, I am left with the choice of not watching your wonderful (ahem) shows, or committing heinous crimes against humanity by downloading the odd episode.
If you are really serious about peace-loving nations not working together with more aggressive nations then america would be in total isolation right now.
Yeah... imagine that.
The funniest part of the pre-election debates was when Bush reminded Kerry that POLAND was in the coalition before the Iraq invasion. As John Stewart said, when Poland is third on your list after the US and UK then you have serious problems.
If they send a nuke or two over then it is just delayed justice and really no different then America invading Iraq
This has got to be the silliest thing I've read in a long time. No genuine notion of justice can encompass 'an eye for an eye' over a period of 60 years between the original offence and the meting out of retribution. Assuming that this kind of revenge-justice were valid (I stronly suggest to you that it is not), why should a 30 year old Japanese die for something Emperor Hirohito oversaw in 1944?
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind... or in this case, makes the whole world a pile of radioactive ashes.
I thought most gamers would have learnt that by now
:P
Oh, they have, they have. Most gamers I know would rather play Quake III than Doom III, for instance - and would probably STILL rather play Doom II than Halo.
IMHO Halo 1 was very, very average on both console and PC. It's one big drawcard, vehicles, was very soon overtaken by Tribes, UT2004, and about a jillion WWII games. It's enemies were boring and repetitive, it's main character characterless, and its storyline basically just a series of linear 'flip the switch' objectives. And in terms of pure gameplay, it was never even in the running, even compared to the original UT and Q3.
But we're not talking about gamers. We're talking about X-Box owners...
I have looked at both. I am what you would call a 'power user' if you wrote for a shitty computer magazine, and frankly neither the iBook or iMac comes close to what I demand from a desktop.
The only Macs that would compete with my current PC would be the G5-based monsters at the deep and of the range and the newest Powerbooks, and they are just waaaay too expensive to consider.
True. Not many PC laptop owners will be playing Doom III either, unless they have one of these.
PS2 is the cruddiest of the current gaming technology still on the market. Bad frame rates, poor textures, bad (IMHO) controls... it stinks, it stinks, it stinks. Yeeees Mr Sherman, eeeverything stinks.
Sure, I'll get a 'cheap' Mac. In the year 2100. I want a Mac, but every time I look at the prices I can't bring myself to abandon good old cheap, fast AMD.
An interesting question is, WHY should gamers switch to linux/Mac? For once the major criticisms levelled at Windows/x86 (often with some justification) seem to bounce back as strong arguments for why a Windows PC is the best option for games by a country mile:
./ for 'BSD' or 'Gnome AND KDE' for more details.
- bad at multitasking: I have one task, blasting hell knights in 3D
- controlled by evil Windoze Empire (tm): good, so the Evil Windoze Empire will make sure I have up to date drivers and a relatively good 3D API to run my games with for the widest possible range of gaming hardware
- boring beige boxes and huge market of faceless south-east asian technology clones: excellent, excellent. The priority is surely on getting the fastest technology at the best price as soon as possible, rather than longevity or overall build quality (although arguably that comes through careful component choice). But the average gaming rig is good for about 2 years of cutting edge games, tops, so it's really more important that the price is good and the market highly dynamic rather than everything being perfectly reliable
On the other hand, the key strengths of Mac and Linux are not so important for games.
E.g. Mac:
- border of LCD screen is artistically colour-neutral to allow perfect visual reproduction of colours on-screen (no shit, this is what it says on the Apple website, and yes, I'm being facetious but the point is, Mac features are clearly pitched at the graphic design/artiste market and people who colour coordinate their entire lives)
- entire computer can be crammed into a very small, white rectangle: well, that's bad for upgrading every 6-12 months, bad for cooling, and makes serious competition for upgrade components etc pretty unlikely. But it saves desk space and looks cool, not priorities for the average gamer (yes, case modding is supposed to be 'cool', but you know what I mean, how many case modders build beautiful white objects rather than glowing neon monstrosities?).
- computer is 'lifestyle' accessory: people who play Doom III typically have no discernable lifestyle other than cramming cheese doodles into their already-Mountain-Dew-filled maws and occasionally leaving to sleep or ablute
E.g. Linux:
- it's free: I'm springing $2000 for a games PC and $50 for every game... I think $200 for Windows is not too much of a stretch. Alternatively, I steal everything including the game, Windows, and possibly the PC if I've played too much GTA. Either way, not a big factor.
- run by a horde of nerds who all make up their own standards then engage in massive and endless wars about whose is the gre@test 3733t way of doing things: refer to Evil Windoze scenario above, or search
- most useful features hidden through inherent 'security' though obscurity (i.e. most non-programmer types can't run xclock, let alone install and configure Doom III): su>ors when U just wanna kill something
Anyway, just my thoughts. I see no real reason why people should be encouraged to move away from Win/x86 just to play games, other than the usual 'Bill Gates is satan' reasons.