Comeback via supercomputing? What does that even mean?
"Hey, having our refinement facilities taken out by Stuxnet may have made us look like a bunch of chumps, and yeah, that was mud on our faces, we admit. But we do have technical chops! See, here's a couple Top 500 supercomputers we built ourselves!"
That's what it means. It's about appearance and reputation.
It's true! In fact it was after someone told me about how they used "neumonic devices" to remember stuff that I went and got my own pneumonic device. The flash drive in my lungs works pretty well, though I am more prone to infection. Overall I can't say I regret it, but I do wish that person had been more clear!
If the ACLU supported the Second Amendment, I'd be a big fan.
I agree in that I wish they supported it, but I'm a big fan anyway. Yes their official stance on the 2nd Amendment is, frankly, absurd and contrary to many court rulings, but the important thing to me is that 1) they do great work supporting all of our other rights and 2) they don't work against 2nd amendment rights.
In fact in the past they've been perfectly willing to work with the NRA to defeat a piece of legislation which the NRA objected to on 2nd Amendment grounds, and the ACLU objected to on other grounds.
So I'm willing to forgive them only fighting for most of our rights, as long as they aren't getting in the way of organizations fighting for the rest of them. They about fighting for the civil liberties they believe in, not fighting against the ones they don't. I'm okay with that, just like I'm okay with someone donating to one charity, but not others.
Just a thought, but if the US was in it for "securing oil".. then shouldn't oil be way less expensive now that it is?
No.
They are securing oil by making sure that some of the world's largest remaining deposits are controlled by governments friendly to the U.S., so when the oil supply begins to dwindle and there isn't enough to go around, the U.S. can be first in line to buy what is left. Ideally there would already be large U.S. military bases in these areas to help ensure that they remain under friendly control, to ensure the military continues to have the oil it needs to function. This is the long-term strategic goal.
In the short term, oil is still a fungible commodity sold on a world market and whose price involves speculation about the stability of future supplies. The very actions the U.S. takes to secure the oil for the long term will necessarily cause instability and thus rising prices in the short term. Also, the long-term supply of oil is clearly in doubt and so you should only expect the price to go up no matter how much the U.S. secures for itself.
Of course for oil companies, this is fantastic for you especially if they aren't pumping oil from one of the unstable areas, because their oil doesn't cost any more to pump but is selling for much more. You see high prices at the pump, the oil companies see ridiculous profits.
What, you didn't think this was done to benefit you, did you?
No one is ready to go to the moon yet, but developing a real multi-supplier infrastructure to get to LEO is a critical first step. Even more importantly, if the next administration changes plans again, the infrastructure will remain in place and make it easy to do whatever the powers that be decide.
Damn straight, you nailed it on the head.
Getting to LEO is the majority of the delta-v needed to get to the surface of the Moon, or to Mars orbit (and is roughly half the delta-v needed to get to the Mars surface). There are many reasons to go to LEO. There are fewer reasons to go past GEO.
Turning access to LEO into a commodity marketplace will make starting a Lunar or other beyond-earth-orbit mission cheaper and easier because you can do the most expensive part (in terms of delta-v) with COTS launchers, fuel and even assemble a larger vessel launched in multiple parts in LEO, and fire it from there towards tho Moon or Mars or wherever.
Rather than having to have a single, giant launcher capable of providing enough delta-v to reach the destination, while carrying the entire stack and its fuel all at the same time. Which because of the lack of reasons currently to leave earth orbit, means it would be a limited-run custom-designed project like the Saturn V.
Instead, any mission can make use of the cheaper access to LEO, relaxing restrictions on overall mass, reducing cost, and reducing design time so as you say if the wind changes, we still have the critical first step nailed.
The U.S. is a Representative Democracy -- a type of democracy -- and a Republic -- a nation whose leader is not a hereditary monarch. These are two orthogonal properties of nations.
We are not a Direct Democracy, which is what people saying "the U.S. isn't a Democracy" usually mean. But we are assuredly a Democracy. And the same comments, issued by Winston Churchill (who was in part describing his own country, which is a Representative Democracy as well), apply.
A Representative Democracy is four wolves and a sheep voting on who is going to decide what's for dinner.:)
Furthermore, I don't understand the irrational hatred of flash that you're trying to convey with your post. Did it beat you up and take your lunch money?
No, that was The Flash. Hating Flash is just a guilt-by-association kind of thing, like how a kid at an Israeli school named Hitler isn't going to be very popular.
Arcades have their place, and it's more of a social competitive & friendship area than anything else. Comradery. It's the real reason people went to arcades. The theory that it was for advanced technology is bunk - Although consoles did kill arcades, it has less to do with the advancement of home technology, and moreso to do with the recluse nature of newer generations being brought up on fast food television WoW culture.
That's one theory.
As someone who frequented arcades in the 80s and 90s, I say that it was the technology that made the arcade obsolete. I had always preferred the camaraderie of playing video games with my actual friends, and playing at home where we were most comfortable -- and we could play for hours without having to bring tons of money -- was always preferable. But arcades were where the games were at. Once game consoles advanced to the point where the only games unique to arcades were ones with specialized input devices (like sit down racing games, Operation Wolf-style shooters), which we weren't that keen on to begin with, there was little reason to go to the arcade.
My apartment was a much better place for my friends and I to get together to play games than the arcade. The seating was more comfortable, nobody was ever hogging the game we wanted to play, there were ample snacks, nobody ever had to bow out because they ran out of quarters, no rules against shouted profanity when your friend won with a cheap shot, and oh yeah once we turned 21, beer in the fridge.
So I can see how some people went to the arcade for "camaraderie". That's a subset of the people who went to arcades, and the rest of them were not solely recluses. Frankly I don't think people who can't find anyone to play games with outside of meeting strangers at an arcade should be casting anti-social stones, and a lot of people I met doing that were jerks, but still I can understand what you're saying about having a community.
Just, I think it's pretty obvious that the subset of people who wanted that was not big enough to keep the arcades in business. The real reason most people went to the arcades is because that's where the games were.
Despite knowing how to manually mount all kinds of crazy media, I haven't had to in years. I stick in CDs, flash cards into my USB reader, my camera (set in Mass Storage mode not Sony Proprietary Crap Mode), external HD, keychain flash cards, whatever, it pops up on the desktop automagically. The only time it failed was on a disk whose partition table was hosed, and ultimately unrecoverable because the disk was going very bad. Messing around with files in/dev couldn't have helped.
Every millisecond spent on facebook is a millisecond not spent at home depot or related pursuits, not spent eating at a restaurant, not spent buying a car or driving around... Computer product importers / retailers and ISPs are pretty much the only industries that are a good fit for facebook.
You want to reach car buyers so you can sell more cars, you put a billboard on the biggest interstate in town, you advertise on TV during nascar races, and you put print ads in a car magazine. You don't advertise to peasant subsistence farmers, real or virtual farmvillers. The real ones can't afford it, and the virtual ones are more interested in clicking mice than driving cars.
You mean you don't reach the small subset of car buyers who are interested in just "driving around" as a form of recreation, rather than simply as a mode of transportation. People playing Farmville still have jobs, need to go to the grocery store, and do everything else that is the only reason most people buy a car.
So you don't advertise Porsche, Ferrari, BMW, etc in Farmville. You advertise Toyota, Honda, Chevy Malibu, and other practical cars. Heck, you can even still advertise BMW to get those who are interested in the car as a status symbol, not the driving experience.
Playing online games is not mutually exclusive with going to Home Depot, eating at a restaurant, or driving around. Every second playing Farmville is not a lost second of those activities, because people who don't play it at all aren't spending vast amounts of time at Home Depot, they still eat dinner at most once a day, and mostly drive to work and other places they need to go, and will need to go whether they play Farmville or not. Hell, I play tons of online and other games (not Farmville), and I'm also at Home Depot every other week. Oh yeah, and I bought a car.
The idea that it is pointless to advertise things not directly related to the activity the person is engaging in is misplaced. They advertise cars, Home Depot, and restaurants to couch potatoes watching shows unrelated to those topics. Yes consideration is required to get the most for your advertising dollar, but it's hardly pointless.
The problem is that in a game series that is traditionally about allowing relatively free-form exploration and sidetracking, having to do a series of quests in a "run" or risk having to do them all over, even the ones you actually finished, is contrary to the whole point. And since they stuck to traditional Zelda design for the game world, with plenty of things to do and see that are tangential to your current "run", this is particularly onerous. Oh look, a tantalizing mystery, but, gotta stay on task!
It's fine to be able to fail at a task. It's annoying to succeed at a task, to succeed at several tasks, but then have to do them over again because you didn't get to the point where you entered the dungeon, or found the item, or whatever it is that will last into the next cycle. And not because the task you didn't complete was hard, but because you moved too slowly and deliberately on it or earlier parts, or were distracted by the secret cave you discovered that had nothing to do with your current run but was fun and interesting.
Making all the fun and interesting things the game designers added into the game into traps that can cause you to fail is not a good way to add challenge. Resisting the temptation to explore should not be part of the challenge in a Zelda game.
it's still a great game, and the time aspect does add to the experience. It just doesn't add in a universally positive way. It was an interesting and bold experiment, and I personally think the result of that experiment is that "Zelda-style adventure game" and "strict time schedule" don't go together well.
And objectively, Majora's Mask is indeed the better game. The world is richer with more things to do. Despite technically being smaller world and only half the number of dungeons. In Ocarina of Time the dungeons felt more repetitive... Put from a pure game-design perspective it was inferior to it's successor.
Heh, I can see your point about the difference versus Ocarina, but I'd think an objective pure game-design perspective would also have to take into account the new central game play mechanic. Which I think is kind of a mixed bag, and certainly explains why a lot of people had trouble getting into the game. Yes, there's a lot of things to do, but it's I think understandably annoying when you have to do them again simply because you're not moving fast enough towards a specific goal.
So, basically I think it's a lot harder to say which is better.:)
I believe, good sir, that if you were to examine the bong in your hand you would observe the following warning label: "Caution: Usage of the wacky tobbacky may alter one's sense of what is or isn't logical."
And if there isn't one, it was clearly an omission on the part of the Surgeon General and you should add it yourself.:)
But in not entirely all seriousness, there isn't exactly a tremendous range of hummingbird sizes, and anyone with any humming bird experience should have at least a ball-park idea of how big this machine is, which is being compared to a hummingbird because that's what it's supposed to be. Oh and Ricky isn't obese, he weights 18.3756 grams and is a Giant Hummingbird and quite a capable flyer, thank you very much.
I think playing one that's "good" first really pulls you into the series. Not that the first one isn't "good", but I don't know why'd you ever play it over Link to the Past at all. LttP is easily the best top-down version in the series.
I dunno, I still think it's fun, but certainly I go back to play LttP the most.
As for the 3D ones, I don't know why people hate Majora's Mask so much. It kept all the things that made Ocarina of Time so great (innovative Z-targeting controls, unique fighting, fun puzzles) and added tons!
Because the central mechanic is an interesting experiment but in practice pretty annoying. Okay, time is a real factor, you have a limited time to get things done, and certain events only happen at specific times and places. And yeah, Impending Doom staring down at you from the sky. Neat. But then you realize that, outside of your inventory, things you accomplish will be undone when you go back, so if you have to do a series of things to get access to a dungeon, you're on the clock and can't stop halfway through. It's a real wet blanket thrown over the free-form exploration aspect which is such an integral part of previous Zelda games.
However, everything you said about the good aspects of the game is completely true. The game improves upon OoT in many respects, and has tons of great gameplay content. Which is why on the balance I think it's a highly recommendable game, and highly underrated.
But I also understand why a lot of people don't want to touch it.
Maybe it's all nostalgia, and I just wouldn't even like OoT if I hadn't played it until now, but I do think that they were pretty innovative and cool at the time, and now they're sticking to the same old formula.
This is just me, but I find that while nostalgic feelings will make me pick up an old beloved game or movie, it won't make me like it. The nostalgia factor wears off quite quickly and the real game's qualities make themselves apparent. Sometimes that means I realize the game is crap and I put it away, or I realize why I liked it in the first place. Not for warm-fuzzies, but fun.
You're right, it does look wrong when it's flying forward quickly. It's appearance when flying slowly, or up, or backwards, etc, which are essentially variations on hovering, aren't that bad, but certainly if you watched it for any length of time it's unnatural nature would be apparent.
I'm honestly shocked that "more than average, less than maximum" is confusing so many people. Okay, maybe the sentence is difficult to parse (I didn't find it so, but whatever), but it is not illogical in the least.
So, while it's bigger than what a hummingbird is likely to be, it is not so big that it couldn't possibly be disguised as a hummingbird.
And in particular, there are quite a few hummingbird species of about that size, and the largest species, the appropriately named Giant Hummingbird is significantly bigger. So "smaller than the largest hummingbird" isn't some kind of cop-out phrase where there's one such example in the Andes mountains but everywhere else it's too big to be a hummer.
But in some places it certainly would be too big. For example in the Eastern United States, the only hummingbird is the small Ruby Throated, and seeing something about twice its size flitting and hovering around would probably just draw more attention to it. So how well it blends in will depend in part on where it is deployed. Oh, and whether or not there are any bird-watchers around to say "gee that thing is bigger than I expected, let me take a closer look with binoculars". Somehow I doubt they're expecting their subterfuge to work in that kind of circumstance.
Oh yes, you quite correctly deduce that I would agree that the current situation is hardly desirable.
However we react to this reality in two different ways:
* By saying that the people have won nothing because the dictatorship still exists.
* By saying that the people have won but one small battle in a lengthy struggle.
Only one of these views is useful for accomplishing difficult tasks in the real world. Successful revolutions are never won in a single stroke, and usually involve things getting much worse before they ever get substantially better. They require patience, a long-term view, and an appreciation of small victories or simply recoverable losses.
Equating what the people have done with nothing is wrong, and useless.
Slashdot Mirror
Comeback via supercomputing? What does that even mean?
"Hey, having our refinement facilities taken out by Stuxnet may have made us look like a bunch of chumps, and yeah, that was mud on our faces, we admit. But we do have technical chops! See, here's a couple Top 500 supercomputers we built ourselves!"
That's what it means. It's about appearance and reputation.
It's true! In fact it was after someone told me about how they used "neumonic devices" to remember stuff that I went and got my own pneumonic device. The flash drive in my lungs works pretty well, though I am more prone to infection. Overall I can't say I regret it, but I do wish that person had been more clear!
It's dangerous to make requesting additional resources an act of insubordination.
True. And it's also dangerous to not make using Psy-Ops to manipulate your superiors into granting your requests an act of insubordination.
If the ACLU supported the Second Amendment, I'd be a big fan.
I agree in that I wish they supported it, but I'm a big fan anyway. Yes their official stance on the 2nd Amendment is, frankly, absurd and contrary to many court rulings, but the important thing to me is that 1) they do great work supporting all of our other rights and 2) they don't work against 2nd amendment rights.
In fact in the past they've been perfectly willing to work with the NRA to defeat a piece of legislation which the NRA objected to on 2nd Amendment grounds, and the ACLU objected to on other grounds.
So I'm willing to forgive them only fighting for most of our rights, as long as they aren't getting in the way of organizations fighting for the rest of them. They about fighting for the civil liberties they believe in, not fighting against the ones they don't. I'm okay with that, just like I'm okay with someone donating to one charity, but not others.
Just a thought, but if the US was in it for "securing oil" .. then shouldn't oil be way less expensive now that it is?
No.
They are securing oil by making sure that some of the world's largest remaining deposits are controlled by governments friendly to the U.S., so when the oil supply begins to dwindle and there isn't enough to go around, the U.S. can be first in line to buy what is left. Ideally there would already be large U.S. military bases in these areas to help ensure that they remain under friendly control, to ensure the military continues to have the oil it needs to function. This is the long-term strategic goal.
In the short term, oil is still a fungible commodity sold on a world market and whose price involves speculation about the stability of future supplies. The very actions the U.S. takes to secure the oil for the long term will necessarily cause instability and thus rising prices in the short term. Also, the long-term supply of oil is clearly in doubt and so you should only expect the price to go up no matter how much the U.S. secures for itself.
Of course for oil companies, this is fantastic for you especially if they aren't pumping oil from one of the unstable areas, because their oil doesn't cost any more to pump but is selling for much more. You see high prices at the pump, the oil companies see ridiculous profits.
What, you didn't think this was done to benefit you, did you?
No one is ready to go to the moon yet, but developing a real multi-supplier infrastructure to get to LEO is a critical first step. Even more importantly, if the next administration changes plans again, the infrastructure will remain in place and make it easy to do whatever the powers that be decide.
Damn straight, you nailed it on the head.
Getting to LEO is the majority of the delta-v needed to get to the surface of the Moon, or to Mars orbit (and is roughly half the delta-v needed to get to the Mars surface). There are many reasons to go to LEO. There are fewer reasons to go past GEO.
Turning access to LEO into a commodity marketplace will make starting a Lunar or other beyond-earth-orbit mission cheaper and easier because you can do the most expensive part (in terms of delta-v) with COTS launchers, fuel and even assemble a larger vessel launched in multiple parts in LEO, and fire it from there towards tho Moon or Mars or wherever.
Rather than having to have a single, giant launcher capable of providing enough delta-v to reach the destination, while carrying the entire stack and its fuel all at the same time. Which because of the lack of reasons currently to leave earth orbit, means it would be a limited-run custom-designed project like the Saturn V.
Instead, any mission can make use of the cheaper access to LEO, relaxing restrictions on overall mass, reducing cost, and reducing design time so as you say if the wind changes, we still have the critical first step nailed.
The U.S. is a Representative Democracy -- a type of democracy -- and a Republic -- a nation whose leader is not a hereditary monarch. These are two orthogonal properties of nations.
We are not a Direct Democracy, which is what people saying "the U.S. isn't a Democracy" usually mean. But we are assuredly a Democracy. And the same comments, issued by Winston Churchill (who was in part describing his own country, which is a Representative Democracy as well), apply.
A Representative Democracy is four wolves and a sheep voting on who is going to decide what's for dinner. :)
Furthermore, I don't understand the irrational hatred of flash that you're trying to convey with your post. Did it beat you up and take your lunch money?
No, that was The Flash. Hating Flash is just a guilt-by-association kind of thing, like how a kid at an Israeli school named Hitler isn't going to be very popular.
Arcades have their place, and it's more of a social competitive & friendship area than anything else. Comradery. It's the real reason people went to arcades. The theory that it was for advanced technology is bunk - Although consoles did kill arcades, it has less to do with the advancement of home technology, and moreso to do with the recluse nature of newer generations being brought up on fast food television WoW culture.
That's one theory.
As someone who frequented arcades in the 80s and 90s, I say that it was the technology that made the arcade obsolete. I had always preferred the camaraderie of playing video games with my actual friends, and playing at home where we were most comfortable -- and we could play for hours without having to bring tons of money -- was always preferable. But arcades were where the games were at. Once game consoles advanced to the point where the only games unique to arcades were ones with specialized input devices (like sit down racing games, Operation Wolf-style shooters), which we weren't that keen on to begin with, there was little reason to go to the arcade.
My apartment was a much better place for my friends and I to get together to play games than the arcade. The seating was more comfortable, nobody was ever hogging the game we wanted to play, there were ample snacks, nobody ever had to bow out because they ran out of quarters, no rules against shouted profanity when your friend won with a cheap shot, and oh yeah once we turned 21, beer in the fridge.
So I can see how some people went to the arcade for "camaraderie". That's a subset of the people who went to arcades, and the rest of them were not solely recluses. Frankly I don't think people who can't find anyone to play games with outside of meeting strangers at an arcade should be casting anti-social stones, and a lot of people I met doing that were jerks, but still I can understand what you're saying about having a community.
Just, I think it's pretty obvious that the subset of people who wanted that was not big enough to keep the arcades in business. The real reason most people went to the arcades is because that's where the games were.
Despite knowing how to manually mount all kinds of crazy media, I haven't had to in years. I stick in CDs, flash cards into my USB reader, my camera (set in Mass Storage mode not Sony Proprietary Crap Mode), external HD, keychain flash cards, whatever, it pops up on the desktop automagically. The only time it failed was on a disk whose partition table was hosed, and ultimately unrecoverable because the disk was going very bad. Messing around with files in /dev couldn't have helped.
"Look! We ruined gaming and making out in one fell swoop!"
"High five!"
But then Avitar would have been about giant, 3D, blue dolphins
With boobs.
Every millisecond spent on facebook is a millisecond not spent at home depot or related pursuits, not spent eating at a restaurant, not spent buying a car or driving around... Computer product importers / retailers and ISPs are pretty much the only industries that are a good fit for facebook.
You want to reach car buyers so you can sell more cars, you put a billboard on the biggest interstate in town, you advertise on TV during nascar races, and you put print ads in a car magazine. You don't advertise to peasant subsistence farmers, real or virtual farmvillers. The real ones can't afford it, and the virtual ones are more interested in clicking mice than driving cars.
You mean you don't reach the small subset of car buyers who are interested in just "driving around" as a form of recreation, rather than simply as a mode of transportation. People playing Farmville still have jobs, need to go to the grocery store, and do everything else that is the only reason most people buy a car.
So you don't advertise Porsche, Ferrari, BMW, etc in Farmville. You advertise Toyota, Honda, Chevy Malibu, and other practical cars. Heck, you can even still advertise BMW to get those who are interested in the car as a status symbol, not the driving experience.
Playing online games is not mutually exclusive with going to Home Depot, eating at a restaurant, or driving around. Every second playing Farmville is not a lost second of those activities, because people who don't play it at all aren't spending vast amounts of time at Home Depot, they still eat dinner at most once a day, and mostly drive to work and other places they need to go, and will need to go whether they play Farmville or not. Hell, I play tons of online and other games (not Farmville), and I'm also at Home Depot every other week. Oh yeah, and I bought a car.
The idea that it is pointless to advertise things not directly related to the activity the person is engaging in is misplaced. They advertise cars, Home Depot, and restaurants to couch potatoes watching shows unrelated to those topics. Yes consideration is required to get the most for your advertising dollar, but it's hardly pointless.
The problem is that in a game series that is traditionally about allowing relatively free-form exploration and sidetracking, having to do a series of quests in a "run" or risk having to do them all over, even the ones you actually finished, is contrary to the whole point. And since they stuck to traditional Zelda design for the game world, with plenty of things to do and see that are tangential to your current "run", this is particularly onerous. Oh look, a tantalizing mystery, but, gotta stay on task!
It's fine to be able to fail at a task. It's annoying to succeed at a task, to succeed at several tasks, but then have to do them over again because you didn't get to the point where you entered the dungeon, or found the item, or whatever it is that will last into the next cycle. And not because the task you didn't complete was hard, but because you moved too slowly and deliberately on it or earlier parts, or were distracted by the secret cave you discovered that had nothing to do with your current run but was fun and interesting.
Making all the fun and interesting things the game designers added into the game into traps that can cause you to fail is not a good way to add challenge. Resisting the temptation to explore should not be part of the challenge in a Zelda game.
it's still a great game, and the time aspect does add to the experience. It just doesn't add in a universally positive way. It was an interesting and bold experiment, and I personally think the result of that experiment is that "Zelda-style adventure game" and "strict time schedule" don't go together well.
And objectively, Majora's Mask is indeed the better game. The world is richer with more things to do. Despite technically being smaller world and only half the number of dungeons.
In Ocarina of Time the dungeons felt more repetitive... Put from a pure game-design perspective it was inferior to it's successor.
Heh, I can see your point about the difference versus Ocarina, but I'd think an objective pure game-design perspective would also have to take into account the new central game play mechanic. Which I think is kind of a mixed bag, and certainly explains why a lot of people had trouble getting into the game. Yes, there's a lot of things to do, but it's I think understandably annoying when you have to do them again simply because you're not moving fast enough towards a specific goal.
So, basically I think it's a lot harder to say which is better. :)
I believe, good sir, that if you were to examine the bong in your hand you would observe the following warning label: "Caution: Usage of the wacky tobbacky may alter one's sense of what is or isn't logical."
And if there isn't one, it was clearly an omission on the part of the Surgeon General and you should add it yourself. :)
But in not entirely all seriousness, there isn't exactly a tremendous range of hummingbird sizes, and anyone with any humming bird experience should have at least a ball-park idea of how big this machine is, which is being compared to a hummingbird because that's what it's supposed to be. Oh and Ricky isn't obese, he weights 18.3756 grams and is a Giant Hummingbird and quite a capable flyer, thank you very much.
I think playing one that's "good" first really pulls you into the series. Not that the first one isn't "good", but I don't know why'd you ever play it over Link to the Past at all. LttP is easily the best top-down version in the series.
I dunno, I still think it's fun, but certainly I go back to play LttP the most.
As for the 3D ones, I don't know why people hate Majora's Mask so much. It kept all the things that made Ocarina of Time so great (innovative Z-targeting controls, unique fighting, fun puzzles) and added tons!
Because the central mechanic is an interesting experiment but in practice pretty annoying. Okay, time is a real factor, you have a limited time to get things done, and certain events only happen at specific times and places. And yeah, Impending Doom staring down at you from the sky. Neat. But then you realize that, outside of your inventory, things you accomplish will be undone when you go back, so if you have to do a series of things to get access to a dungeon, you're on the clock and can't stop halfway through. It's a real wet blanket thrown over the free-form exploration aspect which is such an integral part of previous Zelda games.
However, everything you said about the good aspects of the game is completely true. The game improves upon OoT in many respects, and has tons of great gameplay content. Which is why on the balance I think it's a highly recommendable game, and highly underrated.
But I also understand why a lot of people don't want to touch it.
Maybe it's all nostalgia, and I just wouldn't even like OoT if I hadn't played it until now, but I do think that they were pretty innovative and cool at the time, and now they're sticking to the same old formula.
This is just me, but I find that while nostalgic feelings will make me pick up an old beloved game or movie, it won't make me like it. The nostalgia factor wears off quite quickly and the real game's qualities make themselves apparent. Sometimes that means I realize the game is crap and I put it away, or I realize why I liked it in the first place. Not for warm-fuzzies, but fun.
OoT is fun.
They're aren't yet, but in the future when this technology is deployed everyone will be wearing shiny jumpsuits.
You're right, it does look wrong when it's flying forward quickly. It's appearance when flying slowly, or up, or backwards, etc, which are essentially variations on hovering, aren't that bad, but certainly if you watched it for any length of time it's unnatural nature would be apparent.
I'm honestly shocked that "more than average, less than maximum" is confusing so many people. Okay, maybe the sentence is difficult to parse (I didn't find it so, but whatever), but it is not illogical in the least.
So, while it's bigger than what a hummingbird is likely to be, it is not so big that it couldn't possibly be disguised as a hummingbird.
And in particular, there are quite a few hummingbird species of about that size, and the largest species, the appropriately named Giant Hummingbird is significantly bigger. So "smaller than the largest hummingbird" isn't some kind of cop-out phrase where there's one such example in the Andes mountains but everywhere else it's too big to be a hummer.
But in some places it certainly would be too big. For example in the Eastern United States, the only hummingbird is the small Ruby Throated, and seeing something about twice its size flitting and hovering around would probably just draw more attention to it. So how well it blends in will depend in part on where it is deployed. Oh, and whether or not there are any bird-watchers around to say "gee that thing is bigger than I expected, let me take a closer look with binoculars". Somehow I doubt they're expecting their subterfuge to work in that kind of circumstance.
In any case, this drone is pretty freaking sweet.
No, he meant to imply that only humanity's uses of energy are relevant to the current discussion.
I know, it's quite specieist of them.
Anyone else notice what's missing from tomorrow's cycle ?
Two or more seconds of thought. Try it then come back.
Oh yes, you quite correctly deduce that I would agree that the current situation is hardly desirable.
However we react to this reality in two different ways:
* By saying that the people have won nothing because the dictatorship still exists.
* By saying that the people have won but one small battle in a lengthy struggle.
Only one of these views is useful for accomplishing difficult tasks in the real world. Successful revolutions are never won in a single stroke, and usually involve things getting much worse before they ever get substantially better. They require patience, a long-term view, and an appreciation of small victories or simply recoverable losses.
Equating what the people have done with nothing is wrong, and useless.
Well it is true that life is the leading cause of death, with a 100% mortality rate.
On another note, this reminds me of an old saying: God made man, but Colt made them equal.