The "young" is yet to be demonstrated. (For that matter, so is whether or not this is really ice, but that seems a reasonable bet.) As for "active" -- if it's a glacier, it flows under the force of gravity, and either advances or (depending on temperature) the leading edge retreats; of course it's active.
Yes, as the article noted the results are not certain, so good call there. A retreating glacier is not an active glacier, and an ancient glacier can only stay active if it has its ice renewed as fast or faster than it evaporates, which is why this would seem to be significant if it pans out.
TFA makes a big deal out of the exposed white areas, claiming that ice sublimates quickly on Mars. Well, some places it does, some places it doesn't.
Ah yes of course, and I'm sure you're well versed in which areas those would be and have correlated that with the location of the possible glacier. No, wait, that would be what the people actively researching Mars would do. Stop pretending you're one of them, or that you can elevate yourself to the status of one of them simply through skepticism.
I'm not inflating their claims, perhaps the BBC is.
Oh so it was the BBC that said that this was going to shake the foundation of planetology? Oh, no, that was you, so you could then claim that straw man as being the hyperbole of those darn scientists that you are seeing through with your insightful cynicism.
Honestly, cynicism for cynicism's sake, especially acting alone in lieu of understanding, is completely pointless and never a substitute for actual knowledge. It wasn't presented as anything other than a possible discovery on Mars of something we haven't found before. Stop pretending that they over-stated the claims, and that you used your layman's knowledge to predict those same claims in advance.
Be cynical all you want. I doubt you know enough about planetary climatology to have said whether or not young, active glaciers were probable based solely on the existence of ancient, permanent ice caps. But now that it has been discovered, it's easy for the cynical to say "Oh of course you would expect to find that, we already knew there was ice, duh". When there's simply more to the issue than that.
Nobody said that this should shake the very foundations of planetology, or anything even close to that. You're inflating their claims to enhance your cynical criticism in the same way you're inflating the obviousness of the discovery despite not having any scientific foundation for saying it is obvious to enhance your cynical criticism. Well the scientists don't think it's obvious -- they're not even completely convinced that they're seeing what they think they are -- and frankly scientific knowledge is a better basis for saying something is non-obvious than cynicism is a basis for saying that it is.
Yet people seem to be surprised every time there's the merest hint, or act like it's of some cosmic significance. Sheesh.
Well maybe this is just me, but I tend to be surprised or excited whenever the actual scientists involved are surprised or excited. Seems like they are the ones who would be best equipped to know what the significance is.
I'm pretty sure they are already aware of the Martian ice caps, so maybe there's something more significant to this then? Naw, you're right, it's better to use hindsight to say "that was obvious!" and brush it off.
"We'll see that when Duke Nukem Forever is released" will now imply a concrete date.
Yeah I'm not jumping to that conclusion based on a cut-scene. There have been more complete trailers than that in years (many years) past. I'm sure not giving them the benefit of the doubt now. Still 100% vapor as far as I'm concerned.
Of course even if they did actually ship the game tomorrow, future comparisons to Duke Nukem would still imply a delay of over ten years, a lifetime in gaming.
Since it's been 6 whopping years since the last one I think this could qualify as one of the 50 biggest Gaming Events this year.
Actually I'd say that it's been 6 years since the last teaser of this perpetual piece of vaporware is exactly why this isn't a significant event in gaming.
At this point, the only possible significant event that can involve DNF is the release of the actual game. Anything else is *yawn* more of the same empty promises that we've been hearing for what, a decade now?
As long as you can find life, you can have food outside what you bring along.
It would be a huge leap to assume that we'd be able to metabolize anything we found on another planet. There's plenty of life on this planet that humans can't use as food. But long before that becomes an issue, unless we're assuming faster than light travel, then it would have taken many years to arrive on a distant planet and there's no way you'd have been able to carry enough food to begin with. Either way, we're talking about a long term space expedition in which you're going to have to be able to grow/synthesize whatever you need in a sustainable fashion.
The only place we know that we have it is here on earth.
Nonsense. If we can grow food, if we can make medicine, if we can fabricate replacement parts for our ships and machinery, if we can take care of all the other vitamins and minerals we require then we can find a way to get a chemical as simple as ascorbic acid.
Listen. In order for a mission into deep space all the way to another planet to be successful, it's going to require serious planning of all aspects, because it's a phenomenally complicated and dangerous activity that even in your wildest utopian future dreams remains at the outer limits of human endeavor. One of these aspects will be ensuring the proper nutrition of the occupants of the space vessel. The people responsible for that part of the mission are not going to be such gigantic retards that they forget that humans require Vitamin C. They're going to solve that problem as a minor part of solving the much bigger and more significant general problem of providing a way to create new food for a possibly multi-century journey. Which, in practice, would probably be as simple as adding citrus fruits to the list of things growing in your hydroponics bay. BFD.
how dead the musket is, and finally how dead Van Damme's career is.
I hear both are doing quite well thanks to historical reenactments. Though the version of The Battle of Bunker Hill featuring Van Damme features more kicking than I think the historical record shows, but most people can accept the embellishment for the sake of improved drama.
HOW is what I said any different than worrying about placement of testicles?!?
It's not, they're both idiotic concerns.
Man can live without testicles, but without proper amounts of the various vitamins, man doesn't live long or well. In fact, without those vitamins, humanity would not have lived very long, but has done just fine with externally mounted testicles. That was my point, it was thoroughly missed out by the typical individuals who didn't bother to read up on the comment I was replying to. I'm not surprised.
I read the comment you replied to, I just didn't care that you thought Vitamin C production was a bigger concern than testicle placement and thus didn't address that comparison. Your argument that the lack of Vitamin C production was itself a concern, especially one that would somehow limit space travel unless we genetically engineered ourselves around it, was what I was addressing.
But of course, like every such statement people make (e.g. "There's no way i'm sleeping with that donkey"), there is an unstated but very much present addendum of "unless someone gives me enough money, in which case hell yeah".
P.S. examples are not from personal experience, and you can't prove otherwise.
There's no reason why the kite can't reach and tack just like a normal sail. It's working on the same principles. In fact the kite, which is really more of a parasail, could conceivably do the zig-zagging while the ship maintains a steady course.
Zig-zagging the sail wouldn't change the fact that the force from the wind would be pointed in the opposite direction the ship wants to go.
The ship has to be the thing that zig-zags, because the way tacking works is the keel of the ship prevents sideways motion, and then you direct the ship so that the dot product of the wind vector and the line of the keel is in the forward direction. You can't get that same effect using just a sail or kite.
The question I can't answer is whether modern vessels have anything like a keel, or whether their hulls work as keels. If they don't, then they'd have to be modified before tacking would be possible.
I'm just going to say it. The idea that this space-faring society would remember how to grow/synthesize food with all the proteins, carbohydrates, and other vitamins and minerals we must intake in our diet, but not remember to include vitamin C whether from a natural food source or synthetically created and inserted into the processed food they're eating... is retarded.
Guess what? Scurvy effectively doesn't exist in our society, and we are in absolutely no danger of forgetting why.
The goal should be, 20 years from now, that we don't need oil tankers anymore.
And apparently developing practical, working examples of alternate forms of propulsion using renewable energy for the ships that we will need in 20 years has no part of that?
GTFO. You're talking about some completely insane timeline to completely change our energy infrastructure -- even if fusion power was perfected today, it would take more than 20 years for us to replace every coal plant on earth, and that still doesn't give us any magic solutions for transportation. And these guys come up with a way to right now make it both feasible and economical* to reduce the dependency on fossil fuels in commercial shipping by 20%, even as much as 50% soon, and that's not good enough?
Come on. It's perfectly obvious who has the better idea of how to actually attain your utopian future. And a "drop everything right now, pray we can replace it before our infrastructure collapses" isn't it. Practical, step-wise solutions that actually work are. Kudos to these guys, boo to "if it isn't a magic 100% solution it's nothing".
* And you had better not underestimate the importance of this. Unless you intend on imposing your plan using martial force (and i'd love to see your fossil-fuel-less army) then it's going to have to make sense for everyone to drop what they're using and switch to something cleaner. The rising price of fuel costs is doing a great job of creating the economic motivation, but it's guys like these who have to come up with the actual practical alternatives.
However, a voyage to the stars, without a good supply of replenishable vitamin C would become a trip delimited by a few days/weeks past the day when the vitamin C runs out.
Uh... replace "vitamin C" with "food" and maybe the irrelevance of this issue will become apparent?
It's not like minus vitamin C our bodies are self-sustaining. We still must intake sustenance. Any journey me take will be limited by the supply of food we can bring, which means for any truly lengthy journey we will need to grow food. And our hydroponics bay can't include oranges in the mix-up... why? And if not oranges, some source of the chemicals we use to make Vitamin C artificially today. Whichever. It'll all be part of solving the much bigger problem of food.
Uh, being a "major selling point" is not meant to imply that people would buy any item at this price, or that it is the only thing about the item that makes it desirable. It's meant to imply that it is a major feature that in it's absence would stop many people from buying it. Motions controls and simple intuitive games like Wii Sports are also major selling points, and without them you basically get a Gamecube with commensurate sales. However, as the Ebay auctions show, most people are not willing to buy the Wii without the price-feature either. The people buying Wiis are not hard-core gamers, they were never in the market for a Gamecube-era system anyway, and they aren't willing to spend much more than the Wii's MSRP on any game console. Thus, it's price is a major selling point.
That would indirectly suggest that in this galaxy there was no sufficiently advanced life that would detect, and try to protect itself, or stop, said "death ray".
Um, dude? That "death ray" has a significant scale relative to the size of a galaxy, all of it traveling at (x-rays, gamma rays) or close to (electrons) the speed of light. For one any species caught in its path wouldn't see it until it hit them, and two even if they knew about the beam it isn't clear that they could do anything about it except hide underground for thousands of years or bug out to another part of the galaxy, which itself would require faster-than-light travel. To actually redirect or shield themselves from the beam at a degree that would be visible in our telescopes would require technology on a scale that we can't even dream of.
I find it highly odd that you would be skeptical of the existence of life arising elsewhere in the universe (which while we have no idea what exactly it takes, we know is possible because it has happened at least once), because of the apparent lack of faster than light travel (which according to our current theories is impossible) or even more miraculous feats of what amount to complete science fiction. We can't say that it could ever even be theoretically possible to be "sufficiently advanced" to pull off what you propose, much less if humanity could ever attain it.
Have you seen the Hubble Deep Field? That's an extremely narrow view of the sky, and it's completely stuffed with galaxies. And because this one particular galaxy has not, as far as we can tell, birthed a civilization with Q-like powers, you're questioning whether there could be life anywhere else out there at all? That's literally the oddest form of skepticism I've ever heard.
Unless this is just dead-pan humor. I'll admit that I have problems detecting it when done with subtlety.
That email doesn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy...
Afaik, this issue has only reached the federal appeals court level, and they ruled that email does have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
The reason, as us techie guys so often forget, is that the "reasonable expectation" has nothing to do with the technical feasibility of someone violating your privacy. It has much more to do with social norms, the intent of the user, and active steps being taken by the privacy-violator. It doesn't mean that you can reasonably expect that your privacy can't be violated, it means you can reasonably expect that nobody who is not malicious will.
Plain-ol' email is easy as pie for anyone with access to your packets to read, since they're in plain text. Much like a letter in an standard envelope is pretty trivial to read by holding it up to a light. In both cases the expectation comes from the fact that the letter is intended by the sender to only be read by the receiver, accepted by social norm as something meant to be private, and finally that anyone who wishes to violate your privacy must take active steps in the form of a packet sniffer, or holding your letter up to the light.
This is why you don't have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in a public place, because how can you reasonably expect people to not hear you? With your garbage, you are demonstrating that you don't consider it your private possession anymore because you are sending it to be dumped into a landfill.
So it's fine and dandy to say that we should get people to use more secure OSes -- this is important for protecting yourself from those malicious people I referred to earlier, who don't give a rat's ass about your expectation. But that's besides the point, because the "reasonable expectation of privacy" standard is about limitations on surveillance by law enforcement, and when a warrant is required and when it isn't.
Which means the important thing is to not let the feds change the legal standard into being one of technical feasibility instead of the current standard. Because there's nothing that says that some exploitable hole doesn't exist or won't exist in [insert favorite software here], and by accepting their altered standard you're allowing them to argue that the existence of such a bug is ipso-facto legal permission for them to exploit it.
No. My computer and my data packets are private and the government must acquire a warrant before reading either, regardless of what buggy insecure POS software I choose to run.
But more importantly, the lack of a large premium on the Wii from resellers suggest that the present rate of production and price is very close to the market equilibrium. If demand were far outstripping supply, the premium from resellers on eBay would be far higher.
Not necessarily. This could instead indicate that the demand is elastic with respect to price. That would mean the demand for $250 Wiis is extremely high, while the demand for $400+ Wiis is very low. An item being in short supply relative to the demand does not automatically mean that the people who want the item would be willing to pay more for it. That usually only applies to what are more or less necessities, like gasoline or food staples.
This especially makes sense in the context of who the Wii's primary market is -- casual non-gamers. These are people who maybe saw a friend or relative's Wii, played it and had fun, and decided they want one despite not being into any previous game consoles. For them, $250 for a fun toy may seem like it's worth it. If the toy turns out to be hard to find, are they going to decide that they will instead pay $300, $400, or $500 for it? Or are they going to decide that they don't need it that bad, and can wait until more are available?
It's only the hard-core that are going to be willing to buy their chosen console no matter the price. But even then they're also the ones who'd be willing to call every store in town and show up before they open on shipment day. The latter is the category I fell into. Even I, long-time Nintendo fan boy, wasn't willing to pay scalper mark-ups on a Wii.
What this implies is that despite some theories to the contrary, the Wii's MSRP is in fact a major selling point.
I think the OP is just jealous that they haven't come out with "Shaking Your Cane At Kids to Get Off Your Lawn" complete with a Cane accessory for the Wii yet.
Wasn't that in Wario Ware for the Wii? If not, it should be in the sequel.
Electronics don't just poof into existence. Whether company-owned or outsourced, factories must exist to make products and if those factories can't meet demand, the product won't meet demand.
Yeah, it really bothers me how this whole idiotic conspiracy theory is predicated on the notion that Nintendo HQ has a big knob labeled "Wiis per Month" and they can just turn the knob to however much they want (after inserting the proper amount of cash into the slot below the knob of course) and those malicious bastards refuse to turn the knob any more because they want "Wiis sold out" headlines in the news to generate hysteria.
Think about just one component of the Wii -- let's say the ATI graphics chip. For a complex chip like that, it can take 2-3 months from sticking a blank wafer into the front of the fab to getting a printed wafer out the back, then tack on a couple weeks for testing, packaging, and shipping into supply chains. So ideally let's call it 2.5 months from N asking for more and the extra allotment arriving at N's assembly plants. However ATI outsources their manufacturing to foundries like Chartered and TSMC, so they either have to change their allocation of Wii chips vs their other products, or request additional allocation from their foundries, both of which must be done in advance, and depend on the other demands for the foundries' services as to whether it can even be done.
So is it really that hard to believe that as George Harrison said that they must plan their production output 5 months in advance? They had already bumped it up from 1 mil to 1.8 mil/month earlier this year, and they would have barely had any time to see the effect of the increased production in the market before they would have had to decide to increase production, and by how much. And, even then, unless they had bumped it up by a huge amount like 2-4x, then it still wouldn't have resulted in enough extra wiis to have a serious impact on the holiday season.
Includes such games as Real World TENNIS (indoor and outdoor versions available)
I'm not sure where you are, but up here in the Northern Hemisphere it's winter when Christmas time comes. Even as far south as Texas playing outdoor sports is not something most people, even athletic, think is a good idea.
As far as indoor, while it may be a helpful, I don't know many kids who are going to think "fitness club membership" is an awesome gift.
bowling alley... FRESH AIR.
You know in my word association, "fresh air" makes me think "bowling alley" just before I think "corner dive bar".
Slashdot Mirror
The "young" is yet to be demonstrated. (For that matter, so is whether or not this is really ice, but that seems a reasonable bet.) As for "active" -- if it's a glacier, it flows under the force of gravity, and either advances or (depending on temperature) the leading edge retreats; of course it's active.
Yes, as the article noted the results are not certain, so good call there. A retreating glacier is not an active glacier, and an ancient glacier can only stay active if it has its ice renewed as fast or faster than it evaporates, which is why this would seem to be significant if it pans out.
TFA makes a big deal out of the exposed white areas, claiming that ice sublimates quickly on Mars. Well, some places it does, some places it doesn't.
Ah yes of course, and I'm sure you're well versed in which areas those would be and have correlated that with the location of the possible glacier. No, wait, that would be what the people actively researching Mars would do. Stop pretending you're one of them, or that you can elevate yourself to the status of one of them simply through skepticism.
I'm not inflating their claims, perhaps the BBC is.
Oh so it was the BBC that said that this was going to shake the foundation of planetology? Oh, no, that was you, so you could then claim that straw man as being the hyperbole of those darn scientists that you are seeing through with your insightful cynicism.
Honestly, cynicism for cynicism's sake, especially acting alone in lieu of understanding, is completely pointless and never a substitute for actual knowledge. It wasn't presented as anything other than a possible discovery on Mars of something we haven't found before. Stop pretending that they over-stated the claims, and that you used your layman's knowledge to predict those same claims in advance.
Be cynical all you want. I doubt you know enough about planetary climatology to have said whether or not young, active glaciers were probable based solely on the existence of ancient, permanent ice caps. But now that it has been discovered, it's easy for the cynical to say "Oh of course you would expect to find that, we already knew there was ice, duh". When there's simply more to the issue than that.
Nobody said that this should shake the very foundations of planetology, or anything even close to that. You're inflating their claims to enhance your cynical criticism in the same way you're inflating the obviousness of the discovery despite not having any scientific foundation for saying it is obvious to enhance your cynical criticism. Well the scientists don't think it's obvious -- they're not even completely convinced that they're seeing what they think they are -- and frankly scientific knowledge is a better basis for saying something is non-obvious than cynicism is a basis for saying that it is.
Yet people seem to be surprised every time there's the merest hint, or act like it's of some cosmic significance. Sheesh.
Well maybe this is just me, but I tend to be surprised or excited whenever the actual scientists involved are surprised or excited. Seems like they are the ones who would be best equipped to know what the significance is.
I'm pretty sure they are already aware of the Martian ice caps, so maybe there's something more significant to this then? Naw, you're right, it's better to use hindsight to say "that was obvious!" and brush it off.
"We'll see that when Duke Nukem Forever is released" will now imply a concrete date.
Yeah I'm not jumping to that conclusion based on a cut-scene. There have been more complete trailers than that in years (many years) past. I'm sure not giving them the benefit of the doubt now. Still 100% vapor as far as I'm concerned.
Of course even if they did actually ship the game tomorrow, future comparisons to Duke Nukem would still imply a delay of over ten years, a lifetime in gaming.
Since it's been 6 whopping years since the last one I think this could qualify as one of the 50 biggest Gaming Events this year.
Actually I'd say that it's been 6 years since the last teaser of this perpetual piece of vaporware is exactly why this isn't a significant event in gaming.
At this point, the only possible significant event that can involve DNF is the release of the actual game. Anything else is *yawn* more of the same empty promises that we've been hearing for what, a decade now?
As long as you can find life, you can have food outside what you bring along.
It would be a huge leap to assume that we'd be able to metabolize anything we found on another planet. There's plenty of life on this planet that humans can't use as food. But long before that becomes an issue, unless we're assuming faster than light travel, then it would have taken many years to arrive on a distant planet and there's no way you'd have been able to carry enough food to begin with. Either way, we're talking about a long term space expedition in which you're going to have to be able to grow/synthesize whatever you need in a sustainable fashion.
The only place we know that we have it is here on earth.
Nonsense. If we can grow food, if we can make medicine, if we can fabricate replacement parts for our ships and machinery, if we can take care of all the other vitamins and minerals we require then we can find a way to get a chemical as simple as ascorbic acid.
Listen. In order for a mission into deep space all the way to another planet to be successful, it's going to require serious planning of all aspects, because it's a phenomenally complicated and dangerous activity that even in your wildest utopian future dreams remains at the outer limits of human endeavor. One of these aspects will be ensuring the proper nutrition of the occupants of the space vessel. The people responsible for that part of the mission are not going to be such gigantic retards that they forget that humans require Vitamin C. They're going to solve that problem as a minor part of solving the much bigger and more significant general problem of providing a way to create new food for a possibly multi-century journey. Which, in practice, would probably be as simple as adding citrus fruits to the list of things growing in your hydroponics bay. BFD.
So, you admit then, there is a tape of you and that donkey? ;-)
;)
Oh, I admit no such thing. I only admit that given sufficient funds there would be.
how dead the musket is, and finally how dead Van Damme's career is.
I hear both are doing quite well thanks to historical reenactments. Though the version of The Battle of Bunker Hill featuring Van Damme features more kicking than I think the historical record shows, but most people can accept the embellishment for the sake of improved drama.
HOW is what I said any different than worrying about placement of testicles?!?
It's not, they're both idiotic concerns.
Man can live without testicles, but without proper amounts of the various vitamins, man doesn't live long or well. In fact, without those vitamins, humanity would not have lived very long, but has done just fine with externally mounted testicles.
That was my point, it was thoroughly missed out by the typical individuals who didn't bother to read up on the comment I was replying to. I'm not surprised.
I read the comment you replied to, I just didn't care that you thought Vitamin C production was a bigger concern than testicle placement and thus didn't address that comparison. Your argument that the lack of Vitamin C production was itself a concern, especially one that would somehow limit space travel unless we genetically engineered ourselves around it, was what I was addressing.
Unless I pay someone enough money for the tape, right?
Ah, you're catching on.
But of course, like every such statement people make (e.g. "There's no way i'm sleeping with that donkey"), there is an unstated but very much present addendum of "unless someone gives me enough money, in which case hell yeah".
P.S. examples are not from personal experience, and you can't prove otherwise.
There's no reason why the kite can't reach and tack just like a normal sail. It's working on the same principles. In fact the kite, which is really more of a parasail, could conceivably do the zig-zagging while the ship maintains a steady course.
Zig-zagging the sail wouldn't change the fact that the force from the wind would be pointed in the opposite direction the ship wants to go.
The ship has to be the thing that zig-zags, because the way tacking works is the keel of the ship prevents sideways motion, and then you direct the ship so that the dot product of the wind vector and the line of the keel is in the forward direction. You can't get that same effect using just a sail or kite.
The question I can't answer is whether modern vessels have anything like a keel, or whether their hulls work as keels. If they don't, then they'd have to be modified before tacking would be possible.
Those aren't the same ship.
I'm just going to say it. The idea that this space-faring society would remember how to grow/synthesize food with all the proteins, carbohydrates, and other vitamins and minerals we must intake in our diet, but not remember to include vitamin C whether from a natural food source or synthetically created and inserted into the processed food they're eating... is retarded.
Guess what? Scurvy effectively doesn't exist in our society, and we are in absolutely no danger of forgetting why.
The goal should be, 20 years from now, that we don't need oil tankers anymore.
And apparently developing practical, working examples of alternate forms of propulsion using renewable energy for the ships that we will need in 20 years has no part of that?
GTFO. You're talking about some completely insane timeline to completely change our energy infrastructure -- even if fusion power was perfected today, it would take more than 20 years for us to replace every coal plant on earth, and that still doesn't give us any magic solutions for transportation. And these guys come up with a way to right now make it both feasible and economical* to reduce the dependency on fossil fuels in commercial shipping by 20%, even as much as 50% soon, and that's not good enough?
Come on. It's perfectly obvious who has the better idea of how to actually attain your utopian future. And a "drop everything right now, pray we can replace it before our infrastructure collapses" isn't it. Practical, step-wise solutions that actually work are. Kudos to these guys, boo to "if it isn't a magic 100% solution it's nothing".
* And you had better not underestimate the importance of this. Unless you intend on imposing your plan using martial force (and i'd love to see your fossil-fuel-less army) then it's going to have to make sense for everyone to drop what they're using and switch to something cleaner. The rising price of fuel costs is doing a great job of creating the economic motivation, but it's guys like these who have to come up with the actual practical alternatives.
However, a voyage to the stars, without a good supply of replenishable vitamin C would become a trip delimited by a few days/weeks past the day when the vitamin C runs out.
Uh... replace "vitamin C" with "food" and maybe the irrelevance of this issue will become apparent?
It's not like minus vitamin C our bodies are self-sustaining. We still must intake sustenance. Any journey me take will be limited by the supply of food we can bring, which means for any truly lengthy journey we will need to grow food. And our hydroponics bay can't include oranges in the mix-up... why? And if not oranges, some source of the chemicals we use to make Vitamin C artificially today. Whichever. It'll all be part of solving the much bigger problem of food.
Uh, being a "major selling point" is not meant to imply that people would buy any item at this price, or that it is the only thing about the item that makes it desirable. It's meant to imply that it is a major feature that in it's absence would stop many people from buying it. Motions controls and simple intuitive games like Wii Sports are also major selling points, and without them you basically get a Gamecube with commensurate sales. However, as the Ebay auctions show, most people are not willing to buy the Wii without the price-feature either. The people buying Wiis are not hard-core gamers, they were never in the market for a Gamecube-era system anyway, and they aren't willing to spend much more than the Wii's MSRP on any game console. Thus, it's price is a major selling point.
OK, I have to ask. How exactly do you think you would be able to tell that?
I don't, that was kinda the point.
That would indirectly suggest that in this galaxy there was no sufficiently advanced life that would detect, and try to protect itself, or stop, said "death ray".
Um, dude? That "death ray" has a significant scale relative to the size of a galaxy, all of it traveling at (x-rays, gamma rays) or close to (electrons) the speed of light. For one any species caught in its path wouldn't see it until it hit them, and two even if they knew about the beam it isn't clear that they could do anything about it except hide underground for thousands of years or bug out to another part of the galaxy, which itself would require faster-than-light travel. To actually redirect or shield themselves from the beam at a degree that would be visible in our telescopes would require technology on a scale that we can't even dream of.
I find it highly odd that you would be skeptical of the existence of life arising elsewhere in the universe (which while we have no idea what exactly it takes, we know is possible because it has happened at least once), because of the apparent lack of faster than light travel (which according to our current theories is impossible) or even more miraculous feats of what amount to complete science fiction. We can't say that it could ever even be theoretically possible to be "sufficiently advanced" to pull off what you propose, much less if humanity could ever attain it.
Have you seen the Hubble Deep Field? That's an extremely narrow view of the sky, and it's completely stuffed with galaxies. And because this one particular galaxy has not, as far as we can tell, birthed a civilization with Q-like powers, you're questioning whether there could be life anywhere else out there at all? That's literally the oddest form of skepticism I've ever heard.
Unless this is just dead-pan humor. I'll admit that I have problems detecting it when done with subtlety.
I have no idea if it's right, but I pronounce it like the name of the Ferengi in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
That email doesn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy...
Afaik, this issue has only reached the federal appeals court level, and they ruled that email does have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
The reason, as us techie guys so often forget, is that the "reasonable expectation" has nothing to do with the technical feasibility of someone violating your privacy. It has much more to do with social norms, the intent of the user, and active steps being taken by the privacy-violator. It doesn't mean that you can reasonably expect that your privacy can't be violated, it means you can reasonably expect that nobody who is not malicious will.
Plain-ol' email is easy as pie for anyone with access to your packets to read, since they're in plain text. Much like a letter in an standard envelope is pretty trivial to read by holding it up to a light. In both cases the expectation comes from the fact that the letter is intended by the sender to only be read by the receiver, accepted by social norm as something meant to be private, and finally that anyone who wishes to violate your privacy must take active steps in the form of a packet sniffer, or holding your letter up to the light.
This is why you don't have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in a public place, because how can you reasonably expect people to not hear you? With your garbage, you are demonstrating that you don't consider it your private possession anymore because you are sending it to be dumped into a landfill.
So it's fine and dandy to say that we should get people to use more secure OSes -- this is important for protecting yourself from those malicious people I referred to earlier, who don't give a rat's ass about your expectation. But that's besides the point, because the "reasonable expectation of privacy" standard is about limitations on surveillance by law enforcement, and when a warrant is required and when it isn't.
Which means the important thing is to not let the feds change the legal standard into being one of technical feasibility instead of the current standard. Because there's nothing that says that some exploitable hole doesn't exist or won't exist in [insert favorite software here], and by accepting their altered standard you're allowing them to argue that the existence of such a bug is ipso-facto legal permission for them to exploit it.
No. My computer and my data packets are private and the government must acquire a warrant before reading either, regardless of what buggy insecure POS software I choose to run.
But more importantly, the lack of a large premium on the Wii from resellers suggest that the present rate of production and price is very close to the market equilibrium. If demand were far outstripping supply, the premium from resellers on eBay would be far higher.
Not necessarily. This could instead indicate that the demand is elastic with respect to price. That would mean the demand for $250 Wiis is extremely high, while the demand for $400+ Wiis is very low. An item being in short supply relative to the demand does not automatically mean that the people who want the item would be willing to pay more for it. That usually only applies to what are more or less necessities, like gasoline or food staples.
This especially makes sense in the context of who the Wii's primary market is -- casual non-gamers. These are people who maybe saw a friend or relative's Wii, played it and had fun, and decided they want one despite not being into any previous game consoles. For them, $250 for a fun toy may seem like it's worth it. If the toy turns out to be hard to find, are they going to decide that they will instead pay $300, $400, or $500 for it? Or are they going to decide that they don't need it that bad, and can wait until more are available?
It's only the hard-core that are going to be willing to buy their chosen console no matter the price. But even then they're also the ones who'd be willing to call every store in town and show up before they open on shipment day. The latter is the category I fell into. Even I, long-time Nintendo fan boy, wasn't willing to pay scalper mark-ups on a Wii.
What this implies is that despite some theories to the contrary, the Wii's MSRP is in fact a major selling point.
I think the OP is just jealous that they haven't come out with "Shaking Your Cane At Kids to Get Off Your Lawn" complete with a Cane accessory for the Wii yet.
Wasn't that in Wario Ware for the Wii? If not, it should be in the sequel.
Electronics don't just poof into existence. Whether company-owned or outsourced, factories must exist to make products and if those factories can't meet demand, the product won't meet demand.
Yeah, it really bothers me how this whole idiotic conspiracy theory is predicated on the notion that Nintendo HQ has a big knob labeled "Wiis per Month" and they can just turn the knob to however much they want (after inserting the proper amount of cash into the slot below the knob of course) and those malicious bastards refuse to turn the knob any more because they want "Wiis sold out" headlines in the news to generate hysteria.
Think about just one component of the Wii -- let's say the ATI graphics chip. For a complex chip like that, it can take 2-3 months from sticking a blank wafer into the front of the fab to getting a printed wafer out the back, then tack on a couple weeks for testing, packaging, and shipping into supply chains. So ideally let's call it 2.5 months from N asking for more and the extra allotment arriving at N's assembly plants. However ATI outsources their manufacturing to foundries like Chartered and TSMC, so they either have to change their allocation of Wii chips vs their other products, or request additional allocation from their foundries, both of which must be done in advance, and depend on the other demands for the foundries' services as to whether it can even be done.
So is it really that hard to believe that as George Harrison said that they must plan their production output 5 months in advance? They had already bumped it up from 1 mil to 1.8 mil/month earlier this year, and they would have barely had any time to see the effect of the increased production in the market before they would have had to decide to increase production, and by how much. And, even then, unless they had bumped it up by a huge amount like 2-4x, then it still wouldn't have resulted in enough extra wiis to have a serious impact on the holiday season.
Includes such games as Real World TENNIS (indoor and outdoor versions available)
I'm not sure where you are, but up here in the Northern Hemisphere it's winter when Christmas time comes. Even as far south as Texas playing outdoor sports is not something most people, even athletic, think is a good idea.
As far as indoor, while it may be a helpful, I don't know many kids who are going to think "fitness club membership" is an awesome gift.
bowling alley... FRESH AIR.
You know in my word association, "fresh air" makes me think "bowling alley" just before I think "corner dive bar".