Well, as I've said before I do think Nintendo should have made the straps stronger from the beginning in anticipation of people abusing the controller in unusual ways, but I have to say I find this lawsuit to be pretty meritless. FTFS:
"Owners of the Nintendo Wii reported that when they used the Nintendo remote and wrist strap, as instructed by the material that accompanied the Wii console, the wrist strap broke and caused the remote to leave the user's hand."
Now I don't have a Wii, but based on what I've read on the internet, both the manual and the warning screens they display do not say "Let go of the remote and let the wrist strap keep the remote from flying", rather the opposite. If you use the remote as intended, then the wrist strap is irrelevent because it is secured by your hand.
What most people think of as the Abu Ghraib scandal was a small group of bored, stupid soldiers engaging in some sick thrills which mostly occurred over a period of a few days. They have been punished for it. What they did was for "fun" not policy.
So that law Bush signed wasn't policy either?
There have been asphyxiations during CIA interrogations, and many allegations of torture and abuse outside of the specific incidents of Abu Ghraib. If at this point you think that those things which you can find pictures of on Google Images are the most that has occured, and a law authorizing the President to decide what is and is not torture when they were known to already have an extremely liberal definition is just hot air and not indicative of policy, then I have to say you're very naive.
Japan, Italy, and Germany are presently peaceful democracies after suffering severe violence and occupation for up to seven years. Germany did have a short lived but violent insurgency (the Werewolves) that was put down. Germany seems to have come through it OK, the Nazi pagans didn't take over. The coup attempt by the Japanese Army didn't have legs either.
Thank you. Referring to the time 60 years ago when the U.S. new how to actually accomplish something and reconstruct a nation really puts the current failure in Iraq in sharper relief.
Do you think Japan would have done as well if MacArthur had gone in with absolutely no plan on what to do, no understanding of the culture, and no intention of trying to fix things that were blatantly broken? Rumsfeld said he "doesn't do nation building". Well, nation building is the job he got, but he "didn't do" it in the sense that he didn't have a plan for it.
The coup, by the way, occured before the Emperor surrendered and was an attempt to stop him from doing so. The reason peace prevailed there was because the people were loyal to the Emperor and he told them to lay down arms, and MacArthur was wise enough to retain a ceremonial position for the Emperor, saving face and not giving the people a reason to revolt to protect him. Those poor soldiers stuck on Pacific atols still fighting the war twenty years later? That would have been every Japanese had things been slightly different.
If the current Admin. understood the differences beteen WWII and Iraq II better than you do, maybe Iraq would be going better. Sadly, they think "it worked before, therefore it will work now even if we have no idea what makes now different than then" is sound logic.
Iraq has just reached its one-year election anniversary, the Iraqi economy is strong and growing, the Iraqi security forces are leading increasing numbers of operations, and Iraqi tribes are turning on Al Qaeda in Iraq which has lost at least 7,000 terrorists killed or captured. If the Iraqi people, government, and the Coalition Forces can start getting a handle on the surging sectarian violence, much of which seems to be emanating from Al Sadr's militia which may be spinning out of his control, Iraq could do well.
And a year later, those elections, which were supposed to solve everything, have proven to be largely irrelevent. The current government is as widely held as corrupt and incompetent as the U.S. appointed one before it. If all you wanted was an election irrespective of the situation surrounding it then Saddam held elections too that were also useless outside of appearances.
Did you read your article on the economy? Yay, economic indicators are going up due to the influx of foreign money and oil money. Is it being felt by the average person? No, unemployment is at 30 to 50 percent, and Iraqis are burning through their savings. That might make the economy look good because there is more money churning, but it does not make the prospects of the average Iraqi look good. Still I'm glad that even if they can't walk in the street without fear of being abducted and tortured for wearing the wrong clothes in the wrong neighborhood, at least we've ma
Is it a licensing issue, and if so why not use an OSS browser platform? Am I missing something?
Because, much as I love Firefox on my full-sized monitor, Opera is a much better browser for limited-resolution systems. Opera has been making their bank in the embedded market, and they work well there. From a provide-quality-service-to-customers standpoint, this was probably the best choice for N.
Then there were Helmets for PC computers. Playing "Heretic 1" or "Descent 1" with them was possible, but the machines were not powerful enough to enjoy the games (because there were no 3D cards yet).
I don't know... I played Descent 1 with a VR helmet and while sure it wasn't great looking at 320x200 that was all you got with a normal display anyway so it was "state of the art", and frankly I thought it was awesome. Doom/Heretic not so much, especially because the sprite-based monsters looked ridiculous in 3D. Descent, though, with it's true 3D environments and 3D robots looked incredible with the helmet, and was much more immersive than what the best 3D cards are rendering today on a single screen.
Though, I should add that it merely looked awesome but was in fact unplayable. This was more a factor of this particular helmet whose name I don't recall, which only functioned if you also used the build-in motion-sensing hockey puck. That thing was a true travesty of an input device. Imagine cupping a hockey puck in your hand with your hand turned sideways so that the faces are pointing right/left. Now tilt the hockey puck forward in order to move forward. Yeah, lots of wrist pain, minimal precision. Oh, and it only had two axes, so you really couldn't play descent with it in the first place.
Anyway, I have no idea why there aren't more helmets today. Personally I wouldn't think a pair of 640x480 LCD screens would be that expensive or heavy, and that would be a high enough resolution for me to enjoy the goodies modern graphics cards provide. There are those shutter glasses, but those things are terrible.
On the games I've played, you can exit a game and get back to the main screen with the home button and a dialog box.
Can you get back to your game at the same place, though?
That's the only way I can see using this... I'm playing a game and I want to check the weather right quick so I hop over to the weather channel then back to the game. Otherwise I'd just use the web browser on my computer to call up noaa.gov. That would mean getting off the couch, though, so Wii Weather might do the trick.
My only question is, how is Nintendo going to block users from playing emulated games via the web? That could seriously hurt Virtual Console game sales if someone can figures out all the logistics behind getting the remote to work correctly through the web browser.
What do you mean, a flash-based NES emulator on the web? I'm not aware of anything like that, certainly not an N64 emulator. Or are you talking just normal flash games?
I doubt Nintendo is too worried. Most people will probably be happy to have the games on their console. Especially if getting the remote to work correctly involves any hackery, I doubt it will affect VC sales much at all.
If Nintendo is really worried about VC sales, then they'll create a time-limited demo option. Oh and halve the price, which would tripple my sales at least.
No they don't, because the ends, as in the effect, are a consequence of the means, as in the cause.
So if the ends you want are peace and democracy, and your means are violence and torture, then the ends you get are a non-stop insurgency, civil war, and lawlessness that will at best settle into a theocratic state run by the personal militias of religious extremists.
Are you paying attention to the news? What you are seeing is cause and effect. Are these the ends that you desired? No? Well guess what -- that's why the ends don't justify the means, because you don't get to pick what end your means will achieve! Wishing that torturing random people accused of being terrorists will bring peace and harmony doesn't make it so, and if it isn't obvious to you at this point it never will be because you are deliberately avoiding anything resembling a fact.
Well let me clue you in a little: Abu Ghraib had consequences. Very bad, very tragic consequences. While hardly the lone example of your misplaced philosophy, the fact is that those means have seriously damaged our ends, such that they are probably unachievable. The ends, whether you like it or not, stemmed directly from the means, and hence those means cannot be justified.
So for a three-dimensional object, the left-handed material needs to be spherically symmetric.... For a true cloak to work will require a really neat feat of engineering because the refractive properties of the material must be constantly adjusting with the movement of the cloak.
A true cloak sounds hard, so would the easiest proof of concept then be the Invisibility Hamster Ball?
But the cylindrical symmetry means that the shroud will only work for certain polarizations of light.
Sounds like a weakness. Does this mean I would be able to see it if I wore polarized sunglasses and tilted my head a certain way? While it dampens the possibilities for espionage, that might be handy for finding my hamster, at least.
Yeah, the metaphor that helped me understand was pointing at an object many light years away with a very bright laser. If you wave the laser back and forth, the dot on the distant object would appear to move faster than light, but the dot isn't an object, it's the point at which the laser beam hits the object. The laser itself is moving at c and no more.
Do taxi drivers' brains expand to provide more memory, or do people with poor memory just forget to become taxi drivers?
A huge problem with any of these correlation studies is determining, accurately, which way the cause->effect relationship runs.
Don't get hung up on cause->effect, which implies a one-way relationship. Some things fall into that category, but many things, particularly those involving the brain, are feedback loops where the factors involved are both cause and effect at the same time. Our brain is loaded with feedback loops, as that is how we learn. We know that learning affects the brain in a physical way (children who were never exposed to language have grossly underdeveloped language centers), and we know that the brain's physical parameters affect learning (a child with damaged/underdeveloped language centers may be unable to learn language).
So the taxi-drivers probably self-select for memory because that's what the job takes -- e.g. I'd never take a job as a driver unless desperate, since I'm terrible at remembering street names and names in general. Yet it only makes sense that the task of having to constantly remember directions and street names would enhance the portions of the brain responsible for remembering them.
You've got to be kidding me. I think your brain shut off the second you heard nuclear and radiation.
Yeah, it's like the U.S.A. is Pee Wee's Playhouse, and "radiation" has been the Secret Word for over 50 years.
President Pee-Wee: Okay kids, now what do you do when you hear the word "radiation"? People: WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! President Pee-Wee: That's right! Good sheeple.
Well, my NES never fell apart, but I had to blow on cartridges until my face turned blue. I wonder if that was placebo or if that ever worked?
No, that actually worked.
The problem with the NES was that the connectors were poorly designed with that stupid spring-loading mechanism. Instead of forming a tight connection with the cartridge like all later Nintendo cartridge systems -- including a re-design of the NES late in its life with a top-loading slot -- the original NES depended on the spring-like connector to create pressure. This mean the connection was never terribly good, and a little bit of corrosion or pieces of dust or whatever would break contact. When you blew on the cartridge, you might have dislodged dust, but more importantly the humidity in your breath got the contacts wet and thus they conducted better.
Except, say, if they're trying to pick a quality cell phone provider?
Of course!
The idea is that without knowing which carriers are reliable, the terrorists will by chance pick an unreliable carrier. Then, when they're making the final call to initiate the attack, the call might be dropped, hopefully at a point that makes it sound like the attack is cancelled (like in those television commercials).
Come on, that's about as effective as most of our anti-terrorism initiatives, isn't it?
This "adaption" you mention is what is sometimes referred to as micro-evolution. This is a controversial theory, often used by advocates of Creationism (and to a lesser extent, intelligent-design) to allow them to accept minor changes (such as differing breeds of dogs, etc) while still allowing them to deny that "macro-evolution" or speciation, can occurr. There is no distinction between the two however - both are evolution, slow change over time.
Which is such a cop-out, when evolution-skeptics try to create the distinction. They try to do it because among scientifically minded and aware folks, saying species don't change over time is a sure way to be laughed at. They're trying to get their creationism-based beliefs to be accepted scientifically, so they create the whole "macro-evolution" red-herring, but it doesn't work. So they agree that "micro-evolution" occurs. Alright. Take a population, split it in two such that there is no cross-breeding. Over time each experiences "micro-evolution". Eventually one of these "micro-evolutionary" changes modifies reproductive mechanics, such that were you to bring the two populations together again, they would be unable to interbreed. Bam, you have speciation.
You can't accept "micro-" without "macro-". As you say, they're really one and the same.
Man a 4d6 fireball would do wonders for the worlds energy problems.
A 4d6 fireball implies a level 4 mage, I'm not sure how that works since you can't learn fireball until level 5 (barring changes in D&D 3.5 or something else I'm forgetting). Maybe if you used a scroll... But in any event, you can only do that a couple times a day!
No, for solving the world's energy problems, it's all about Continual Light. That's one that will really piss off the Thermodynamicists!
It's no surprise why CISC processors have destroyed RISC in the past decade.
Sorry but CISC, specifically x86 and children, has won simply by being the architecture for which most software was written. The dominance of CISC is similar to (but not the same, trying to stave off an off-topic rant) story as the dominance of Windows -- backward compatability is King.
The RISC makers knew this too. Back when RISC was the hot new thing in the early 90s, they were touting that RISC would be so much faster than CISC that you could emulate/translate x86 code and run it faster than a native x86 machine. If this had come to pass, then the reason to have, and thus the dominance of, x86 would have ended.
But it never did come to pass. CISC machines, starting with the Pentium Pro, started to translate CISC instructions into RISC micro-instructions internally, and then used all the benefits that RISC machines got with the main penalty being the complicated decoders on the front-end. Intel could push the performance of their chips, in large part by leveraging the enourmous profits of the lucrative desktop PC business, and thus kept rough parity with RISC machines, often being faster. Since the fundamental performance problem with CISC had been solved, and it still ran all the software, CISC won and RISC lost in the mainstream processor market.
Now of course there are performance pros and cons to both. While potentially reduced code size is the main advantage of CISC, I don't think it adds up to much. Especially since things like SSE2 instructions have gotten large anyway. The main advantage of RISC is the simpler decoders, and more registers. x86-64 gives more registers, plus with a fast l1 cache stack accesses aren't expensive, and the x86 makers learned a long time ago how to make good super-scalar x86 decoders. In the end the pluses and minuses don't add up to much, and it's more about the specific architectures of each chip. In this sense x86 has done a fine job of keeping performance high.
It's unfortunate from an aesthetic point of view, because x86 is an ugly beast, but in the end practicality won, and generally there's no practical reason to care any more.
Just fyi, that has nothing to do with the cartridge, and everything to do with the poorly-designed connector on the NES itself. The SNES and N64 do not suffer from these problems, and cartridges still work fine. As do NES cartridges if you have a work-around for the connector, like a Game Genie. Cartridges, for all their faults, are quite reliable. It's extremely difficult to scratch one, for example.
I doubt you could find a PS1 that has been in use for 10 years that still works. Very few people I know owned only one PS1 or PS2. The PS2 seems especially prone to failure, as I know several who are on their 3rd or 4th one. In some ways, though, this is a general problem with optical drives which contain moving parts and will eventually fail. Failing optical drives is the main problem for Gamecubes and Xboxen as well.
Sony and Nintendo are the same company. At the end of the day they don't care about us as consumers, they care about MAKING A PROFIT period!
The question is how do they go about it.
If you don't think there is any difference at all between the behavior of Sony and Nintendo, then you either have been paying absolutely zero attention and are saying "They're the same because I don't know any better", or you are the one who is smoking.
Had this been Sony the post would have been 1,563 comments long with 95% of them saying, "Sony sucks and should burn in hell", "rootkit"!
Yeah, because if this had been Sony there wouldn't have been a recall, they would flat-out state that it is the customer's fault, and do nothing to fix the problem. Why would the rootkit come up? Well, what was their response?
The fact that Nintendo is fixing the problem -- in fact, already fixed it on newly shipped wiimotes, this recall only affects purchasers of the initial lots -- is the only reason they're getting a pass and some people are calling the wiimote-flingers dumb. If Nintendo was giving their customers the finger like Sony does, you would see a different reaction.
The reason you don't get it is because you think that everything is equal and you can ignore context. Nintendo and Sony are not the same company, and this is an example of why.
boss: did you test the strap to see if it could withstand the forces generated on it by a wiimote going 50+ mph?
strap guy: why would I? you aren't supposed to throw it, in fact there is a safety screen to that effect in every game, sometimes more than one.
case guy: I tested it. Case can withstand impact into cement wall when thrown by pro baseball pitcher. Both fastball and curve.
electronics guy: I also tested it. Accelerometers and PCB remain functional when experiencing forces like blow from karate master.
strap guy: Shut up, guys. You aren't helping me here.
boss: Hm, true, we have no reports of broken controllers, only straps. But we do have that warning screen right?
warning screen guy: Yes, but nobody reads warnings. Ask U.S. Surgeon General.
strap guy: Shut up!
That's basically the problem. As you can tell from the fact that even after being hurled at 50+ mph the wiimote still works, Nintendo usually has a very high standard of durability. It's unusual that Nintendo would let something like this slip. Especially when the entire purpose of the strap is to prevent the wiimote from flying off if someone accidentally lets go of it. If there was anything that should have been engineered beyond the expected limits, it's the safety strap.
I don't really think it's Nintendo's "fault", as in I don't think they are shipping a negligently shoddy product. I do expect more from Nintendo though. I do think their response is the correct one, and a classy one to boot.
Although, I find it interesting that every case of strap breakage has had only one outcome for the Wiimote: It still works! I mean, if you watch the video above, you'd think that it's in a million pieces after that. Nope, he picks it up and tries to throw another 100 MPH pitch. (!)
That's actually what I find the oddest about this situation. Nintendo has, historically, made extremely durable hardware. Much more durable than there is any sane justification for. I remember way back in the day a letter to Nintendo Power about a family who (somehow, accidentally) ran over their NES with a Lincoln Continental. They had to unscrew it and re-seat the casing so cartriges would fit, but then it worked just fine. Who on earth would expect that? Here you see someone throwing a controller full force directly into a wall, and it works just fine.
Hence I'm rather surprised that the wiimote strap wasn't over-engineered beyond what Nintendo expected people would do such that it would still manage quite well when abused in ways Nintendo hadn't imagined. If instead of videos of the wrist strap breaking, YouTube had videos of people hooking the strap over something and doing pullups on it, I would not have been surprised.
Given their history and engineering standards, it's quite possible that from Nintendo's persective they do consider this a failure on their part.
You do realize that one of the reasons Social Security numbers make for terrible ID is because once your Social Security number is compromised it is extremely difficult to change.
Guess what problem the new system also has?
But that's what happens when all you see is (does something) and fail to distinguish between (does something smart) and (does something stupid). Politicians and internet trolls are famous for this failing.
Whereas in the past science was misused and constrained by the church, today it has been co-opted by politics.
Note that when the church was constraining science was when the church was at its most powerful politically, thus making it pretty much the same as being co-opted by politics.
It is the nature of politics -- whether the political power is exercised by democratic governments or theocratic religious institutions -- to view everything as a tool through which to pursue the politician's objectives. Rarely if ever are things like science used to define the objective. The result is that if the science says something that goes against the political objective, then it is the science that must change.
While you're right to observe that science goes on regardless, and scientific progress is made, that isn't the point. The point is that today, right now, there are decisions being made that could use the information provided by science to produce a better decision. Instead, the decision is being made first, and the science is either being ignored or twisted to support that decision. The result is beneficial for the politicians, and usually detrimental to everyone else.
If you ever needed a practical example of how facts should aid the definition of policy, rather than policy causing the redefinition of facts, simply look at Iraq. Is it yet obvious the difference between somebody's belief as to what the answer should be irrespective of facts vs the answer suggested by the real facts has profound consequences? It was the policy of the administration that the Iraqis would welcome us with roses, Democracy would flourish, and Iraq would become a shining example of hope in the Middle East. It was strongly suggested by the facts that nobody welcomes invaders, chaos would flourish particularly if there was no plan to prevent it, and Iraq would become a disaster. Today, as we struggle to come up with a plausible way of preventing the worst-case scenarios that the policy said were impossible, I think the dangers of ignoring the politicization of science are apparent.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, as I've said before I do think Nintendo should have made the straps stronger from the beginning in anticipation of people abusing the controller in unusual ways, but I have to say I find this lawsuit to be pretty meritless. FTFS:
"Owners of the Nintendo Wii reported that when they used the Nintendo remote and wrist strap, as instructed by the material that accompanied the Wii console, the wrist strap broke and caused the remote to leave the user's hand."
Now I don't have a Wii, but based on what I've read on the internet, both the manual and the warning screens they display do not say "Let go of the remote and let the wrist strap keep the remote from flying", rather the opposite. If you use the remote as intended, then the wrist strap is irrelevent because it is secured by your hand.
What most people think of as the Abu Ghraib scandal was a small group of bored, stupid soldiers engaging in some sick thrills which mostly occurred over a period of a few days. They have been punished for it. What they did was for "fun" not policy.
So that law Bush signed wasn't policy either?
There have been asphyxiations during CIA interrogations, and many allegations of torture and abuse outside of the specific incidents of Abu Ghraib. If at this point you think that those things which you can find pictures of on Google Images are the most that has occured, and a law authorizing the President to decide what is and is not torture when they were known to already have an extremely liberal definition is just hot air and not indicative of policy, then I have to say you're very naive.
Japan, Italy, and Germany are presently peaceful democracies after suffering severe violence and occupation for up to seven years. Germany did have a short lived but violent insurgency (the Werewolves) that was put down. Germany seems to have come through it OK, the Nazi pagans didn't take over. The coup attempt by the Japanese Army didn't have legs either.
Thank you. Referring to the time 60 years ago when the U.S. new how to actually accomplish something and reconstruct a nation really puts the current failure in Iraq in sharper relief.
Do you think Japan would have done as well if MacArthur had gone in with absolutely no plan on what to do, no understanding of the culture, and no intention of trying to fix things that were blatantly broken? Rumsfeld said he "doesn't do nation building". Well, nation building is the job he got, but he "didn't do" it in the sense that he didn't have a plan for it.
The coup, by the way, occured before the Emperor surrendered and was an attempt to stop him from doing so. The reason peace prevailed there was because the people were loyal to the Emperor and he told them to lay down arms, and MacArthur was wise enough to retain a ceremonial position for the Emperor, saving face and not giving the people a reason to revolt to protect him. Those poor soldiers stuck on Pacific atols still fighting the war twenty years later? That would have been every Japanese had things been slightly different.
If the current Admin. understood the differences beteen WWII and Iraq II better than you do, maybe Iraq would be going better. Sadly, they think "it worked before, therefore it will work now even if we have no idea what makes now different than then" is sound logic.
Iraq has just reached its one-year election anniversary, the Iraqi economy is strong and growing, the Iraqi security forces are leading increasing numbers of operations, and Iraqi tribes are turning on Al Qaeda in Iraq which has lost at least 7,000 terrorists killed or captured. If the Iraqi people, government, and the Coalition Forces can start getting a handle on the surging sectarian violence, much of which seems to be emanating from Al Sadr's militia which may be spinning out of his control, Iraq could do well.
And a year later, those elections, which were supposed to solve everything, have proven to be largely irrelevent. The current government is as widely held as corrupt and incompetent as the U.S. appointed one before it. If all you wanted was an election irrespective of the situation surrounding it then Saddam held elections too that were also useless outside of appearances.
Did you read your article on the economy? Yay, economic indicators are going up due to the influx of foreign money and oil money. Is it being felt by the average person? No, unemployment is at 30 to 50 percent, and Iraqis are burning through their savings. That might make the economy look good because there is more money churning, but it does not make the prospects of the average Iraqi look good. Still I'm glad that even if they can't walk in the street without fear of being abducted and tortured for wearing the wrong clothes in the wrong neighborhood, at least we've ma
Is it a licensing issue, and if so why not use an OSS browser platform? Am I missing something?
Because, much as I love Firefox on my full-sized monitor, Opera is a much better browser for limited-resolution systems. Opera has been making their bank in the embedded market, and they work well there. From a provide-quality-service-to-customers standpoint, this was probably the best choice for N.
Then there were Helmets for PC computers. Playing "Heretic 1" or "Descent 1" with them was possible, but the machines were not powerful enough to enjoy the games (because there were no 3D cards yet).
I don't know... I played Descent 1 with a VR helmet and while sure it wasn't great looking at 320x200 that was all you got with a normal display anyway so it was "state of the art", and frankly I thought it was awesome. Doom/Heretic not so much, especially because the sprite-based monsters looked ridiculous in 3D. Descent, though, with it's true 3D environments and 3D robots looked incredible with the helmet, and was much more immersive than what the best 3D cards are rendering today on a single screen.
Though, I should add that it merely looked awesome but was in fact unplayable. This was more a factor of this particular helmet whose name I don't recall, which only functioned if you also used the build-in motion-sensing hockey puck. That thing was a true travesty of an input device. Imagine cupping a hockey puck in your hand with your hand turned sideways so that the faces are pointing right/left. Now tilt the hockey puck forward in order to move forward. Yeah, lots of wrist pain, minimal precision. Oh, and it only had two axes, so you really couldn't play descent with it in the first place.
Anyway, I have no idea why there aren't more helmets today. Personally I wouldn't think a pair of 640x480 LCD screens would be that expensive or heavy, and that would be a high enough resolution for me to enjoy the goodies modern graphics cards provide. There are those shutter glasses, but those things are terrible.
On the games I've played, you can exit a game and get back to the main screen with the home button and a dialog box.
Can you get back to your game at the same place, though?
That's the only way I can see using this... I'm playing a game and I want to check the weather right quick so I hop over to the weather channel then back to the game. Otherwise I'd just use the web browser on my computer to call up noaa.gov. That would mean getting off the couch, though, so Wii Weather might do the trick.
My only question is, how is Nintendo going to block users from playing emulated games via the web? That could seriously hurt Virtual Console game sales if someone can figures out all the logistics behind getting the remote to work correctly through the web browser.
What do you mean, a flash-based NES emulator on the web? I'm not aware of anything like that, certainly not an N64 emulator. Or are you talking just normal flash games?
I doubt Nintendo is too worried. Most people will probably be happy to have the games on their console. Especially if getting the remote to work correctly involves any hackery, I doubt it will affect VC sales much at all.
If Nintendo is really worried about VC sales, then they'll create a time-limited demo option. Oh and halve the price, which would tripple my sales at least.
The ends justify the means.
No they don't, because the ends, as in the effect, are a consequence of the means, as in the cause.
So if the ends you want are peace and democracy, and your means are violence and torture, then the ends you get are a non-stop insurgency, civil war, and lawlessness that will at best settle into a theocratic state run by the personal militias of religious extremists.
Are you paying attention to the news? What you are seeing is cause and effect. Are these the ends that you desired? No? Well guess what -- that's why the ends don't justify the means, because you don't get to pick what end your means will achieve! Wishing that torturing random people accused of being terrorists will bring peace and harmony doesn't make it so, and if it isn't obvious to you at this point it never will be because you are deliberately avoiding anything resembling a fact.
Well let me clue you in a little: Abu Ghraib had consequences. Very bad, very tragic consequences. While hardly the lone example of your misplaced philosophy, the fact is that those means have seriously damaged our ends, such that they are probably unachievable. The ends, whether you like it or not, stemmed directly from the means, and hence those means cannot be justified.
So for a three-dimensional object, the left-handed material needs to be spherically symmetric. ...
For a true cloak to work will require a really neat feat of engineering because the refractive properties of the material must be constantly adjusting with the movement of the cloak.
A true cloak sounds hard, so would the easiest proof of concept then be the Invisibility Hamster Ball?
But the cylindrical symmetry means that the shroud will only work for certain polarizations of light.
Sounds like a weakness. Does this mean I would be able to see it if I wore polarized sunglasses and tilted my head a certain way? While it dampens the possibilities for espionage, that might be handy for finding my hamster, at least.
Yeah, the metaphor that helped me understand was pointing at an object many light years away with a very bright laser. If you wave the laser back and forth, the dot on the distant object would appear to move faster than light, but the dot isn't an object, it's the point at which the laser beam hits the object. The laser itself is moving at c and no more.
Do taxi drivers' brains expand to provide more memory, or do people with poor memory just forget to become taxi drivers?
A huge problem with any of these correlation studies is determining, accurately, which way the cause->effect relationship runs.
Don't get hung up on cause->effect, which implies a one-way relationship. Some things fall into that category, but many things, particularly those involving the brain, are feedback loops where the factors involved are both cause and effect at the same time. Our brain is loaded with feedback loops, as that is how we learn. We know that learning affects the brain in a physical way (children who were never exposed to language have grossly underdeveloped language centers), and we know that the brain's physical parameters affect learning (a child with damaged/underdeveloped language centers may be unable to learn language).
So the taxi-drivers probably self-select for memory because that's what the job takes -- e.g. I'd never take a job as a driver unless desperate, since I'm terrible at remembering street names and names in general. Yet it only makes sense that the task of having to constantly remember directions and street names would enhance the portions of the brain responsible for remembering them.
You've got to be kidding me. I think your brain shut off the second you heard nuclear and radiation.
Yeah, it's like the U.S.A. is Pee Wee's Playhouse, and "radiation" has been the Secret Word for over 50 years.
President Pee-Wee: Okay kids, now what do you do when you hear the word "radiation"?
People: WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
President Pee-Wee: That's right! Good sheeple.
Well, my NES never fell apart, but I had to blow on cartridges until my face turned blue. I wonder if that was placebo or if that ever worked?
No, that actually worked.
The problem with the NES was that the connectors were poorly designed with that stupid spring-loading mechanism. Instead of forming a tight connection with the cartridge like all later Nintendo cartridge systems -- including a re-design of the NES late in its life with a top-loading slot -- the original NES depended on the spring-like connector to create pressure. This mean the connection was never terribly good, and a little bit of corrosion or pieces of dust or whatever would break contact. When you blew on the cartridge, you might have dislodged dust, but more importantly the humidity in your breath got the contacts wet and thus they conducted better.
Except, say, if they're trying to pick a quality cell phone provider?
Of course!
The idea is that without knowing which carriers are reliable, the terrorists will by chance pick an unreliable carrier. Then, when they're making the final call to initiate the attack, the call might be dropped, hopefully at a point that makes it sound like the attack is cancelled (like in those television commercials).
Come on, that's about as effective as most of our anti-terrorism initiatives, isn't it?
This "adaption" you mention is what is sometimes referred to as micro-evolution. This is a controversial theory, often used by advocates of Creationism (and to a lesser extent, intelligent-design) to allow them to accept minor changes (such as differing breeds of dogs, etc) while still allowing them to deny that "macro-evolution" or speciation, can occurr. There is no distinction between the two however - both are evolution, slow change over time.
Which is such a cop-out, when evolution-skeptics try to create the distinction. They try to do it because among scientifically minded and aware folks, saying species don't change over time is a sure way to be laughed at. They're trying to get their creationism-based beliefs to be accepted scientifically, so they create the whole "macro-evolution" red-herring, but it doesn't work. So they agree that "micro-evolution" occurs. Alright. Take a population, split it in two such that there is no cross-breeding. Over time each experiences "micro-evolution". Eventually one of these "micro-evolutionary" changes modifies reproductive mechanics, such that were you to bring the two populations together again, they would be unable to interbreed. Bam, you have speciation.
You can't accept "micro-" without "macro-". As you say, they're really one and the same.
Man a 4d6 fireball would do wonders for the worlds energy problems.
A 4d6 fireball implies a level 4 mage, I'm not sure how that works since you can't learn fireball until level 5 (barring changes in D&D 3.5 or something else I'm forgetting). Maybe if you used a scroll... But in any event, you can only do that a couple times a day!
No, for solving the world's energy problems, it's all about Continual Light. That's one that will really piss off the Thermodynamicists!
It's no surprise why CISC processors have destroyed RISC in the past decade.
Sorry but CISC, specifically x86 and children, has won simply by being the architecture for which most software was written. The dominance of CISC is similar to (but not the same, trying to stave off an off-topic rant) story as the dominance of Windows -- backward compatability is King.
The RISC makers knew this too. Back when RISC was the hot new thing in the early 90s, they were touting that RISC would be so much faster than CISC that you could emulate/translate x86 code and run it faster than a native x86 machine. If this had come to pass, then the reason to have, and thus the dominance of, x86 would have ended.
But it never did come to pass. CISC machines, starting with the Pentium Pro, started to translate CISC instructions into RISC micro-instructions internally, and then used all the benefits that RISC machines got with the main penalty being the complicated decoders on the front-end. Intel could push the performance of their chips, in large part by leveraging the enourmous profits of the lucrative desktop PC business, and thus kept rough parity with RISC machines, often being faster. Since the fundamental performance problem with CISC had been solved, and it still ran all the software, CISC won and RISC lost in the mainstream processor market.
Now of course there are performance pros and cons to both. While potentially reduced code size is the main advantage of CISC, I don't think it adds up to much. Especially since things like SSE2 instructions have gotten large anyway. The main advantage of RISC is the simpler decoders, and more registers. x86-64 gives more registers, plus with a fast l1 cache stack accesses aren't expensive, and the x86 makers learned a long time ago how to make good super-scalar x86 decoders. In the end the pluses and minuses don't add up to much, and it's more about the specific architectures of each chip. In this sense x86 has done a fine job of keeping performance high.
It's unfortunate from an aesthetic point of view, because x86 is an ugly beast, but in the end practicality won, and generally there's no practical reason to care any more.
Just fyi, that has nothing to do with the cartridge, and everything to do with the poorly-designed connector on the NES itself. The SNES and N64 do not suffer from these problems, and cartridges still work fine. As do NES cartridges if you have a work-around for the connector, like a Game Genie. Cartridges, for all their faults, are quite reliable. It's extremely difficult to scratch one, for example.
I doubt you could find a PS1 that has been in use for 10 years that still works. Very few people I know owned only one PS1 or PS2. The PS2 seems especially prone to failure, as I know several who are on their 3rd or 4th one. In some ways, though, this is a general problem with optical drives which contain moving parts and will eventually fail. Failing optical drives is the main problem for Gamecubes and Xboxen as well.
Sony and Nintendo are the same company. At the end of the day they don't care about us as consumers, they care about MAKING A PROFIT period!
The question is how do they go about it.
If you don't think there is any difference at all between the behavior of Sony and Nintendo, then you either have been paying absolutely zero attention and are saying "They're the same because I don't know any better", or you are the one who is smoking.
Had this been Sony the post would have been 1,563 comments long with 95% of them saying, "Sony sucks and should burn in hell", "rootkit"!
Yeah, because if this had been Sony there wouldn't have been a recall, they would flat-out state that it is the customer's fault, and do nothing to fix the problem. Why would the rootkit come up? Well, what was their response?
The fact that Nintendo is fixing the problem -- in fact, already fixed it on newly shipped wiimotes, this recall only affects purchasers of the initial lots -- is the only reason they're getting a pass and some people are calling the wiimote-flingers dumb. If Nintendo was giving their customers the finger like Sony does, you would see a different reaction.
The reason you don't get it is because you think that everything is equal and you can ignore context. Nintendo and Sony are not the same company, and this is an example of why.
boss: did you test the strap to see if it could withstand the forces generated on it by a wiimote going 50+ mph?
strap guy: why would I? you aren't supposed to throw it, in fact there is a safety screen to that effect in every game, sometimes more than one.
case guy: I tested it. Case can withstand impact into cement wall when thrown by pro baseball pitcher. Both fastball and curve.
electronics guy: I also tested it. Accelerometers and PCB remain functional when experiencing forces like blow from karate master.
strap guy: Shut up, guys. You aren't helping me here.
boss: Hm, true, we have no reports of broken controllers, only straps. But we do have that warning screen right?
warning screen guy: Yes, but nobody reads warnings. Ask U.S. Surgeon General.
strap guy: Shut up!
That's basically the problem. As you can tell from the fact that even after being hurled at 50+ mph the wiimote still works, Nintendo usually has a very high standard of durability. It's unusual that Nintendo would let something like this slip. Especially when the entire purpose of the strap is to prevent the wiimote from flying off if someone accidentally lets go of it. If there was anything that should have been engineered beyond the expected limits, it's the safety strap.
I don't really think it's Nintendo's "fault", as in I don't think they are shipping a negligently shoddy product. I do expect more from Nintendo though. I do think their response is the correct one, and a classy one to boot.
Although, I find it interesting that every case of strap breakage has had only one outcome for the Wiimote: It still works! I mean, if you watch the video above, you'd think that it's in a million pieces after that. Nope, he picks it up and tries to throw another 100 MPH pitch. (!)
That's actually what I find the oddest about this situation. Nintendo has, historically, made extremely durable hardware. Much more durable than there is any sane justification for. I remember way back in the day a letter to Nintendo Power about a family who (somehow, accidentally) ran over their NES with a Lincoln Continental. They had to unscrew it and re-seat the casing so cartriges would fit, but then it worked just fine. Who on earth would expect that? Here you see someone throwing a controller full force directly into a wall, and it works just fine.
Hence I'm rather surprised that the wiimote strap wasn't over-engineered beyond what Nintendo expected people would do such that it would still manage quite well when abused in ways Nintendo hadn't imagined. If instead of videos of the wrist strap breaking, YouTube had videos of people hooking the strap over something and doing pullups on it, I would not have been surprised.
Given their history and engineering standards, it's quite possible that from Nintendo's persective they do consider this a failure on their part.
You do realize that one of the reasons Social Security numbers make for terrible ID is because once your Social Security number is compromised it is extremely difficult to change.
Guess what problem the new system also has?
But that's what happens when all you see is (does something) and fail to distinguish between (does something smart) and (does something stupid). Politicians and internet trolls are famous for this failing.
I find this worth mentioning in any article about national IDs that mentions a connection to fighting terrorism:
All of the 9-11 hijackers had valid ID.
If necessary, read that again and let it sink in.
I can't tell you what problem a national ID card solves, but I can tell you for sure what problem it doesn't solve.
Are they using the interstate commerce clause yet again?
Government: Um, yeah. Commerce clause. Why not.
Whereas in the past science was misused and constrained by the church, today it has been co-opted by politics.
Note that when the church was constraining science was when the church was at its most powerful politically, thus making it pretty much the same as being co-opted by politics.
It is the nature of politics -- whether the political power is exercised by democratic governments or theocratic religious institutions -- to view everything as a tool through which to pursue the politician's objectives. Rarely if ever are things like science used to define the objective. The result is that if the science says something that goes against the political objective, then it is the science that must change.
While you're right to observe that science goes on regardless, and scientific progress is made, that isn't the point. The point is that today, right now, there are decisions being made that could use the information provided by science to produce a better decision. Instead, the decision is being made first, and the science is either being ignored or twisted to support that decision. The result is beneficial for the politicians, and usually detrimental to everyone else.
If you ever needed a practical example of how facts should aid the definition of policy, rather than policy causing the redefinition of facts, simply look at Iraq. Is it yet obvious the difference between somebody's belief as to what the answer should be irrespective of facts vs the answer suggested by the real facts has profound consequences? It was the policy of the administration that the Iraqis would welcome us with roses, Democracy would flourish, and Iraq would become a shining example of hope in the Middle East. It was strongly suggested by the facts that nobody welcomes invaders, chaos would flourish particularly if there was no plan to prevent it, and Iraq would become a disaster. Today, as we struggle to come up with a plausible way of preventing the worst-case scenarios that the policy said were impossible, I think the dangers of ignoring the politicization of science are apparent.