I'm going to have to call BS here. There's nothing you can possibly be doing that matters that much that you have to type ++i so your debug builds won't suck.
It's not BS. It's not a binary suck vs not suck, it's about small improvements like I said. If you are using complex iterators, like my environment does, with lots of debug-only validation and value checking, then creating temporaries is wasteful.
The rule about avoiding premature optimization is because you shouldn't be spending effort when you don't need to be. 0% extra effort for 1% speedup is just fine by those standards.
The compiler I work on actually transforms native type i++'s into ++i's in the parser stage if expression's return value is ignored, and it looks like GCC does the same thing:
This can be quite expensive, but it's typically only a problem if you're doing it in a loop. (See sibling note about premature optimization.) ... Of course if the temporary register is not used, an optimizing compiler will eliminate it completely.
I like my non-optimized debug builds to not suck as much possible. While all your users may only care about the highly optimized release build, as a developer I spend most of my time running debug builds and every 1% extra to get to the point of interest affects the turnaround time on bug fixes.
The previous comment on premature optimization applies, but I consider using ++x instead of x++ to be a no-brainer for a standalone statement, in particular its most common usage, which happens to be where it matters most, which is incrementing a loop iterator.
Speaking of C++, this applies even moreso with loop iterators.
Right, because I can barely hit the Z button to save my life. I think for both of us it's basically useless, though. The Z button and the ludcrously huge A button (i don't mind it being bigger, but it makes it more work than it should to move your thumb to one of the other buttons) are the only things i don't like about the GC controller.
I knew what you were doing, I was making a joke based on the subject of your post.
You were probably modded down because most spelling nazi posts are modded down. Some are modded up, though, because moderators are habitual crack users and thus unpredictable.
Tinfoil hat or no, nobody has any business knowing what's going on in my car, or where it is, except for me.
I'm still trying to figure out where it happened that allowing people to track you without your knowledge became seen as "normal" and not just trusting random people you've never met in a faceless corporation not to abuse this power is considered "tinfoil hat" territory.
Anyway, I bought a Toyota. The Toyota financer was trying to sell me all the option packages, including LoJack. LoJack is a system where they put a microwave transmitter/receiver (so it can be detected even from an underground garage) in your car, and police cars have a transmitter/receiver that can turn on your LoJack transmitter and then find your car.
After scaring me with the frequency of auto thefts* and telling me how LoJake users were able to get their cars back, he then gave me the line that because it's run by the police and they only turn it on if you report your car stolen "it's not Big Brother-ish like On Star".
That's right. He said giving the police the ability to remotely track your car everywhere, even underground, was not Big Brother-ish. I couldn't help it; I laughed at him.
Though at least he's right in one sense, that LoJack only lets the police track your car's location instead of letting them listen in on your conversations. I assume. But frankly, I don't want to live in a world where I have to say things like "At least when the police track every movement of my car they can't listen to what I'm saying, too!"
I have, and they're hilarious. Funny how despite outright insulting the lawyers sending C&Ds they never decide to actually file a lawsuit!
I was going to go reminisce, but I got this from my work proxy: "Forbidden, this page is categorized as: Criminal Skills, P2P/Personal Network Storage. "
Take a moment and visit the takedown notice: http://farmersreallysucks.com/cgi-bin/QAD_CMS.pl?p age=E1_First_Takedown.html and you can read all the claims that the lawyers used to attempt to force the site down. All the counterclaims are in red, and while IANAL, I did have one read my response and he did greenlight it as accurate..
Or, more to the point than your lawyer green-lighting it, is that their lawyers read it and realized you were not going to cave in to their half-baked leagally unfounded takedown notice.
I love reading takedown notices like that. They're usually so obviously cow plop that it just reeks of desperation.
Anybody, lawyer or not, can threaten to sue to get someone to do what they want. There have been countless examples of this on the internet. It costs next to nothing, and if they get you to do what they want without suing then it doesn't matter if their legal claims were baseless. It doesn't matter if their legal claims would have gotten them disbarred or fined for filing a frivilous suit because they never had to show up in court. On the other hand if you don't do what they want and they cave, then it's pretty clear how legitimate their complaint was to begin with. It's not as if Farmers Insurance would worry about the legal cost of pursuing their completely legitimate case!
Man I fucked up that other post. PREVIEW, always use PREVIEW!
Take a moment and visit the takedown notice: http://farmersreallysucks.com/cgi-bin/QAD_CMS.pl?p age=E1_First_Takedown.html and you can read all the claims that the lawyers used to attempt to force the site down. All the counterclaims are in red, and while IANAL, I did have one read my response and he did greenlight it as accurate.their lawyers read it and realized you were not going to cave in to their half-baked leagally unfounded takedown notice.
I love reading takedown notices like that. They're usually so obviously cow plop that it just reeks of desperation.
Anybody, lawyer or not, can threaten to sue to get someone to do what they want. There have been countless examples of this on the internet. It costs next to nothing, and if they get you to do what they want without suing then it doesn't matter if their legal claims were baseless. It doesn't matter if their legal claims would have gotten them disbarred or fined for filing a frivilous suit because they never had to show up in court. On the other hand if you don't do what they want and they cave, then it's pretty clear how legitimate their complaint was to begin with. It's not as if Farmers Insurance would worry about the legal cost of pursuing their completely legitimate case!
How is a slashdotter not aware that the typical purpose of a lawsuit is to get the defendent to cave under the threat of extreme legal expenses before it goes to trial so the truth never has to be aired?
Guess who typically has more money to litigate: the doctor or their patient?
The distinction I made: "you" is the conscious mind that claims in a slashdot post to be able to distinguish reality from fantasy; "your neurons" is the low-level mechanism by which neuronal pathways are strengthened. There is a real difference between the two.
Only as a matter of how closely you are looking. "I" am the neural pathways and the mechanism for strengthening them. The thoughts I'm having right now feed into the next, which can both be expressed as a series of conscious thoughts or a sequence of firings and strengthenings of neural connections. There is no difference, if you're talking about a level at which concepts such as "opponent" or "killing" exist. It is only through that conscious mind that posts on slashdot that the neurons create a connection between actions in a video game and responses.
I agree that the stimuli and responses are very different. I don't think they're COMPLETELY different. Similarities: increased blood pressure, adrenaline, feel of threat, aggression...
But at that point you've generalized the experience so much that it applies to everything even remotely competitive.
The general sensations may have some similarity, but the actual actions of a game of CS do not translate at all into the actions of killing in real life. The only possible way to create such a connection is through high-level associations because killing in real life is fundamentally not the same as "killing" in a video game and only my conscious,/.-posting mind can even recognize that they are in any way related.
I think if you dropped a compulsive Counterstrike player into a tense business meeting he would have some crossover. (the falluja case would probably have everything overridden by fear). There have been lots of anecdotes in previous slashdot threads about instinctively checking out the meeting room/street/whatever for cover or sniping positions.
Sure, that becomes second nature. Now do they also instinctively move to that sniper position, and attempt to kill anyone who is wearing a different color of clothing than they are? Just because someone thinks a lot about things like sniper positions doesn't mean they are unable to tell that it is not actually an appropriate situation for sniping.
And are you also suggesting that a person who participates in tense business meetings is also going to become a killer?
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
A poignant quote. I personally found it very relevent and meaningful, because I was always denying my neighbors access to my technology so that I could to use that technology to crush them and subjugate them.
Your neurons can't tell anything, other than what chemicals are tingling their receptors! It is only by combining them into a huge, massively parallel network called "the human brain" that it can begin to compose concepts such as "opponent", "killing", or "fantasy".
In other words the distinction you make between "you" and "your neurons" is illusory. "I" can distinguish fantasy from reality therefore "my neurons" can as well.
But to nevertheless address your problem directly: The stimuli and responses involved in playing a video game versus killing someone in real life are completely different and thus do not reinforce the same pathways. And those stimuli and responses are always conditioned by the internal state of the brain which is aware of whether a situation is reality or fantasty.
This is obvious. Or do you think if you dropped a compulsive Counterstrike player into the middle of Falluja with an M-4 he would react in a way at all similar to how he reacts to a round of CS?
firmly believe that there are some people whose morality and upbringing inoculates them against committing violent acts, some who would do it regardless, and some who are borderline cases, for whom the constant diet of violence on TV and in video games (and, who knows, in their real life surroundings) is just the push they need.
And I firmly believe that a normal person, by the time they are ten, has no trouble at all distinguishing reality from make believe and will not become violent simply by playing a violent video game.
So should we ban violent videogames because a tiny number of borderline psychotics might find GTA or Wack a Mole to be the thing that pushes them over?
Well, if we agree to that, what about everything else that might push one person out of a million over the edge? TV? Books? Paintings? Some of that Rennaisance art has some pretty graphic imagry! What about discussions about violent crime -- couldn't the nightly news be that very same trigger? You can't possibly predict what will be the thing that pushes someone over. So rather than dealing with psychopaths on a case-by-case basis, we have to ban everything that might "set them off". Ludicrous.
Fact: An extremely tiny number of kids commit violent crimes out of an extremely huge number who play videogames. Probably the same ratio to those who read Harry Potter books, watched Barney or Seasame Street, or any number of things which nobody thinks need to be banned for causing crime. The simple statistics of the matter is ignored only because the kids at Columbine played DOOM. So what? Millions of kids played DOOM, and 2 decided to go on a rampage. That's about as good odds as you are going to get.
Do people who are against video game regulation consider the level of violence in the US acceptable? If not, what do they see as the causes of America's very high (relative to other "first world" or developed nations) rates of violence, and what do they propose to do about it?
Since video games are played just as much in other developed nations, it obviously isn't our video games.
Right? Isn't that obvious? So why do you ask "people who are against video game regulation" as if that has anything to do with violence in America? You've already assumed that video games are a possible cause despite the complete lack of even a correlation.
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but no correlation does imply no causation.
So as to "what do they propose to do about it?" As always I propose dealing with the underlying causes of crime, which are more difficult to pin down. I can't say for sure what they are, but I'd suggest comparing America's violence vs other nations with America's rates of the following: 1) Child abuse 2) Child neglect 3) Single parent families 4) Two parent families where both work full time
I could go on speculating, but the point is you need to look at deeper social and economic issues than what media a kid consumes when his parents are never around.
Though honestly that still may be missing the mark, since the rate of crime among minors has been dropping steadily for a couple decades now (even as video games become ever more prominent -- I detect a correlation; video games prevent crime). Then the question becomes why are adults comitting more crime than in other nations, and those answers are almost always socio-economic in nature.
But nobody ever wants to actually address difficult socio-economic problems. They'd rather ban video games. That's easy and gives them a good feeling of doing something, even if it is useless.
Exactly. One of the virtues of the Model M that I extol when proselytizing to users of inferior keyboards is its suitability for use in home defense. Simply hefting it in a threatening manner should be enough to disuade your average burglar, and since you're always at your computer (aren't you?) it's always ready when you need it.
Yeah, when I read that he was going to compare Das Keyboard to his old Model M, I thought "Why even buy a new keyboard? You already have the best!" There's nothing that compares to a Model M except a newer version of same (I believe the PCKeyboard.com keyboards are derivatives of the same design). Okay, maybe some ergonomic keyboards for the sake of ergonomics, but no "normal" keyboard can compare with the Model M.
It's like he bought a Miata and was somehow surprised and dissapointed that it wasn't as fast as the Ferrari he already owned.
I heard Jobs was interested in an iPod Emacs because of all the features, but when he saw the default key bindings his hair caught fire and the project was canned.
Yes, google is reinforcing China's restrictions by vanishing the news items themselves from the summary page.
If they just wanted to make the site more useable, they could present the exact same Google news page but replace the links to forbidden information with "This link rendered inoperable at the request of the PRC" or some other informative message.
By instead completely eliminating the offending article's entry, they prevent Chinese readers from knowing what information is being censored or even knowing that such information exists to be censored. In doing so, Google is entirely complicit in China's censorship and thus are censors themselves.
Does Metroid Prime count? What about Eternal Darkness? I see your point, but does it matter if those more mature games come from 1st party teams working closely with Nintendo, rather than an internal dev team in Nintendo itself?
I just don't think "mature games" are the kinds of games Shigeru Miyamoto wants to make, and frankly I'm not about to tell that man what he should do.
culminating in an absolutely fabulous final battle against Gannondorf.
Oh yes. The best end battle of the series, without a doubt. Best boss battle, period, I'd say.
One of the reasons why, something that took me a while to realize, was that for the first time ever Zelda isn't a useless weight around your neck. I was dissapointed by Ocarina's Zelda who seemed bad-ass, but turned into your typical damsel in distress as soon as she put on a dress. Not so in Wind Waker.
Yes, it was easy. On the other hand, so was every other Zelda game.
And speaking of every other Zelda game, every game has featured Link as a child or at most a teenager saving the world from evil, and taken pains to remind you of it both with the story and with the graphics.
On the other hand, the original Zelda wasn't that easy. For the later games, in particular Ocarina and Wind Waker, I wouldn't have minded some kind of difficulty knob.
Slashdot Mirror
unloading a few shots from a shotgun into the crowd will disperse them pretty damn quickly.
In L.A?! Are you crazy?
Well if I'm going to die, I want to die listening to my favorite songs.
But that really puts it in the same category of "emergency" gear as cyanide tablets and peril sensitive sunglasses.
I'm going to have to call BS here. There's nothing you can possibly be doing that matters that much that you have to type ++i so your debug builds won't suck.
It's not BS. It's not a binary suck vs not suck, it's about small improvements like I said. If you are using complex iterators, like my environment does, with lots of debug-only validation and value checking, then creating temporaries is wasteful.
The rule about avoiding premature optimization is because you shouldn't be spending effort when you don't need to be. 0% extra effort for 1% speedup is just fine by those standards.
The compiler I work on actually transforms native type i++'s into ++i's in the parser stage if expression's return value is ignored, and it looks like GCC does the same thing:
I didn't know that. That is good.
This can be quite expensive, but it's typically only a problem if you're doing it in a loop. (See sibling note about premature optimization.) ...
Of course if the temporary register is not used, an optimizing compiler will eliminate it completely.
I like my non-optimized debug builds to not suck as much possible. While all your users may only care about the highly optimized release build, as a developer I spend most of my time running debug builds and every 1% extra to get to the point of interest affects the turnaround time on bug fixes.
The previous comment on premature optimization applies, but I consider using ++x instead of x++ to be a no-brainer for a standalone statement, in particular its most common usage, which happens to be where it matters most, which is incrementing a loop iterator.
Speaking of C++, this applies even moreso with loop iterators.
Right, because I can barely hit the Z button to save my life. I think for both of us it's basically useless, though. The Z button and the ludcrously huge A button (i don't mind it being bigger, but it makes it more work than it should to move your thumb to one of the other buttons) are the only things i don't like about the GC controller.
I knew what you were doing, I was making a joke based on the subject of your post.
You were probably modded down because most spelling nazi posts are modded down. Some are modded up, though, because moderators are habitual crack users and thus unpredictable.
You misspelled it.
It's F-L-A-M-E.
What do I win?
Tinfoil hat or no, nobody has any business knowing what's going on in my car, or where it is, except for me.
I'm still trying to figure out where it happened that allowing people to track you without your knowledge became seen as "normal" and not just trusting random people you've never met in a faceless corporation not to abuse this power is considered "tinfoil hat" territory.
Anyway, I bought a Toyota. The Toyota financer was trying to sell me all the option packages, including LoJack. LoJack is a system where they put a microwave transmitter/receiver (so it can be detected even from an underground garage) in your car, and police cars have a transmitter/receiver that can turn on your LoJack transmitter and then find your car.
After scaring me with the frequency of auto thefts* and telling me how LoJake users were able to get their cars back, he then gave me the line that because it's run by the police and they only turn it on if you report your car stolen "it's not Big Brother-ish like On Star".
That's right. He said giving the police the ability to remotely track your car everywhere, even underground, was not Big Brother-ish. I couldn't help it; I laughed at him.
Though at least he's right in one sense, that LoJack only lets the police track your car's location instead of letting them listen in on your conversations. I assume. But frankly, I don't want to live in a world where I have to say things like "At least when the police track every movement of my car they can't listen to what I'm saying, too!"
I have, and they're hilarious. Funny how despite outright insulting the lawyers sending C&Ds they never decide to actually file a lawsuit!
I was going to go reminisce, but I got this from my work proxy: "Forbidden, this page is categorized as: Criminal Skills, P2P/Personal Network Storage. "
LOL.
Take a moment and visit the takedown notice: http://farmersreallysucks.com/cgi-bin/QAD_CMS.pl?p age=E1_First_Takedown.html and you can read all the claims that the lawyers used to attempt to force the site down. All the counterclaims are in red, and while IANAL, I did have one read my response and he did greenlight it as accurate..
Or, more to the point than your lawyer green-lighting it, is that their lawyers read it and realized you were not going to cave in to their half-baked leagally unfounded takedown notice.
I love reading takedown notices like that. They're usually so obviously cow plop that it just reeks of desperation.
Anybody, lawyer or not, can threaten to sue to get someone to do what they want. There have been countless examples of this on the internet. It costs next to nothing, and if they get you to do what they want without suing then it doesn't matter if their legal claims were baseless. It doesn't matter if their legal claims would have gotten them disbarred or fined for filing a frivilous suit because they never had to show up in court. On the other hand if you don't do what they want and they cave, then it's pretty clear how legitimate their complaint was to begin with. It's not as if Farmers Insurance would worry about the legal cost of pursuing their completely legitimate case!
Man I fucked up that other post. PREVIEW, always use PREVIEW!
Take a moment and visit the takedown notice: http://farmersreallysucks.com/cgi-bin/QAD_CMS.pl?p age=E1_First_Takedown.html and you can read all the claims that the lawyers used to attempt to force the site down. All the counterclaims are in red, and while IANAL, I did have one read my response and he did greenlight it as accurate.their lawyers read it and realized you were not going to cave in to their half-baked leagally unfounded takedown notice.
I love reading takedown notices like that. They're usually so obviously cow plop that it just reeks of desperation.
Anybody, lawyer or not, can threaten to sue to get someone to do what they want. There have been countless examples of this on the internet. It costs next to nothing, and if they get you to do what they want without suing then it doesn't matter if their legal claims were baseless. It doesn't matter if their legal claims would have gotten them disbarred or fined for filing a frivilous suit because they never had to show up in court. On the other hand if you don't do what they want and they cave, then it's pretty clear how legitimate their complaint was to begin with. It's not as if Farmers Insurance would worry about the legal cost of pursuing their completely legitimate case!
How is a slashdotter not aware that the typical purpose of a lawsuit is to get the defendent to cave under the threat of extreme legal expenses before it goes to trial so the truth never has to be aired?
Guess who typically has more money to litigate: the doctor or their patient?
The distinction I made: "you" is the conscious mind that claims in a slashdot post to be able to distinguish reality from fantasy; "your neurons" is the low-level mechanism by which neuronal pathways are strengthened. There is a real difference between the two.
/.-posting mind can even recognize that they are in any way related.
Only as a matter of how closely you are looking. "I" am the neural pathways and the mechanism for strengthening them. The thoughts I'm having right now feed into the next, which can both be expressed as a series of conscious thoughts or a sequence of firings and strengthenings of neural connections. There is no difference, if you're talking about a level at which concepts such as "opponent" or "killing" exist. It is only through that conscious mind that posts on slashdot that the neurons create a connection between actions in a video game and responses.
I agree that the stimuli and responses are very different. I don't think they're COMPLETELY different. Similarities: increased blood pressure, adrenaline, feel of threat, aggression...
But at that point you've generalized the experience so much that it applies to everything even remotely competitive.
The general sensations may have some similarity, but the actual actions of a game of CS do not translate at all into the actions of killing in real life. The only possible way to create such a connection is through high-level associations because killing in real life is fundamentally not the same as "killing" in a video game and only my conscious,
I think if you dropped a compulsive Counterstrike player into a tense business meeting he would have some crossover. (the falluja case would probably have everything overridden by fear). There have been lots of anecdotes in previous slashdot threads about instinctively checking out the meeting room/street/whatever for cover or sniping positions.
Sure, that becomes second nature. Now do they also instinctively move to that sniper position, and attempt to kill anyone who is wearing a different color of clothing than they are? Just because someone thinks a lot about things like sniper positions doesn't mean they are unable to tell that it is not actually an appropriate situation for sniping.
And are you also suggesting that a person who participates in tense business meetings is also going to become a killer?
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
A poignant quote. I personally found it very relevent and meaningful, because I was always denying my neighbors access to my technology so that I could to use that technology to crush them and subjugate them.
Your neurons can't tell anything, other than what chemicals are tingling their receptors! It is only by combining them into a huge, massively parallel network called "the human brain" that it can begin to compose concepts such as "opponent", "killing", or "fantasy".
In other words the distinction you make between "you" and "your neurons" is illusory. "I" can distinguish fantasy from reality therefore "my neurons" can as well.
But to nevertheless address your problem directly: The stimuli and responses involved in playing a video game versus killing someone in real life are completely different and thus do not reinforce the same pathways. And those stimuli and responses are always conditioned by the internal state of the brain which is aware of whether a situation is reality or fantasty.
This is obvious. Or do you think if you dropped a compulsive Counterstrike player into the middle of Falluja with an M-4 he would react in a way at all similar to how he reacts to a round of CS?
firmly believe that there are some people whose morality and upbringing inoculates them against committing violent acts, some who would do it regardless, and some who are borderline cases, for whom the constant diet of violence on TV and in video games (and, who knows, in their real life surroundings) is just the push they need.
And I firmly believe that a normal person, by the time they are ten, has no trouble at all distinguishing reality from make believe and will not become violent simply by playing a violent video game.
So should we ban violent videogames because a tiny number of borderline psychotics might find GTA or Wack a Mole to be the thing that pushes them over?
Well, if we agree to that, what about everything else that might push one person out of a million over the edge? TV? Books? Paintings? Some of that Rennaisance art has some pretty graphic imagry! What about discussions about violent crime -- couldn't the nightly news be that very same trigger? You can't possibly predict what will be the thing that pushes someone over. So rather than dealing with psychopaths on a case-by-case basis, we have to ban everything that might "set them off". Ludicrous.
Fact: An extremely tiny number of kids commit violent crimes out of an extremely huge number who play videogames. Probably the same ratio to those who read Harry Potter books, watched Barney or Seasame Street, or any number of things which nobody thinks need to be banned for causing crime. The simple statistics of the matter is ignored only because the kids at Columbine played DOOM. So what? Millions of kids played DOOM, and 2 decided to go on a rampage. That's about as good odds as you are going to get.
Do people who are against video game regulation consider the level of violence in the US acceptable? If not, what do they see as the causes of America's very high (relative to other "first world" or developed nations) rates of violence, and what do they propose to do about it?
Since video games are played just as much in other developed nations, it obviously isn't our video games.
Right? Isn't that obvious? So why do you ask "people who are against video game regulation" as if that has anything to do with violence in America? You've already assumed that video games are a possible cause despite the complete lack of even a correlation.
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but no correlation does imply no causation.
So as to "what do they propose to do about it?" As always I propose dealing with the underlying causes of crime, which are more difficult to pin down. I can't say for sure what they are, but I'd suggest comparing America's violence vs other nations with America's rates of the following:
1) Child abuse
2) Child neglect
3) Single parent families
4) Two parent families where both work full time
I could go on speculating, but the point is you need to look at deeper social and economic issues than what media a kid consumes when his parents are never around.
Though honestly that still may be missing the mark, since the rate of crime among minors has been dropping steadily for a couple decades now (even as video games become ever more prominent -- I detect a correlation; video games prevent crime). Then the question becomes why are adults comitting more crime than in other nations, and those answers are almost always socio-economic in nature.
But nobody ever wants to actually address difficult socio-economic problems. They'd rather ban video games. That's easy and gives them a good feeling of doing something, even if it is useless.
Exactly. One of the virtues of the Model M that I extol when proselytizing to users of inferior keyboards is its suitability for use in home defense. Simply hefting it in a threatening manner should be enough to disuade your average burglar, and since you're always at your computer (aren't you?) it's always ready when you need it.
So they're marketing cigarettes to mayflies now? Will the evils of the tobacco companies never end?!
Yeah, when I read that he was going to compare Das Keyboard to his old Model M, I thought "Why even buy a new keyboard? You already have the best!" There's nothing that compares to a Model M except a newer version of same (I believe the PCKeyboard.com keyboards are derivatives of the same design). Okay, maybe some ergonomic keyboards for the sake of ergonomics, but no "normal" keyboard can compare with the Model M.
It's like he bought a Miata and was somehow surprised and dissapointed that it wasn't as fast as the Ferrari he already owned.
I heard Jobs was interested in an iPod Emacs because of all the features, but when he saw the default key bindings his hair caught fire and the project was canned.
1 L = 1kg of water, right? So I'd say about c^2 J/L.
:)
How much of that you can extract depends entirely on your process. I recommend anti-matter reaction.
Yes, google is reinforcing China's restrictions by vanishing the news items themselves from the summary page.
If they just wanted to make the site more useable, they could present the exact same Google news page but replace the links to forbidden information with "This link rendered inoperable at the request of the PRC" or some other informative message.
By instead completely eliminating the offending article's entry, they prevent Chinese readers from knowing what information is being censored or even knowing that such information exists to be censored. In doing so, Google is entirely complicit in China's censorship and thus are censors themselves.
Bad troll! No cookie!
Does Metroid Prime count? What about Eternal Darkness? I see your point, but does it matter if those more mature games come from 1st party teams working closely with Nintendo, rather than an internal dev team in Nintendo itself?
I just don't think "mature games" are the kinds of games Shigeru Miyamoto wants to make, and frankly I'm not about to tell that man what he should do.
culminating in an absolutely fabulous final battle against Gannondorf.
Oh yes. The best end battle of the series, without a doubt. Best boss battle, period, I'd say.
One of the reasons why, something that took me a while to realize, was that for the first time ever Zelda isn't a useless weight around your neck. I was dissapointed by Ocarina's Zelda who seemed bad-ass, but turned into your typical damsel in distress as soon as she put on a dress. Not so in Wind Waker.
Yes, it was easy. On the other hand, so was every other Zelda game.
And speaking of every other Zelda game, every game has featured Link as a child or at most a teenager saving the world from evil, and taken pains to remind you of it both with the story and with the graphics.
On the other hand, the original Zelda wasn't that easy. For the later games, in particular Ocarina and Wind Waker, I wouldn't have minded some kind of difficulty knob.