The problem is that to change the current situations, the swing states have to change the way they cast their electoral votes. That's completely up to the states. If you were the governor of, let's say, Florida. Would you really want to push for a change that puts your state away from the spotlight? It might be for the greater good of the US, but the people that would lose the most out of the change are the ones that can make the decision. In the same way, republicans and democrats are the ones stopping instant runoff and condorcet voting: There's no way this change would help them.
That'd be really, really bad for me. I'm switching jobs, and I set things up so that I left my current job the 26 to start working the 8th, giving myself plenty of time to finish GTA!
Note to self, do not set up your life around projected release dates
He's probably thinking about Tekken. There were plenty of time-release characters in the arcade versions of Tekken 2 and TT, if memory serves me right.
There are a few Go games for the GBA already. Hikaru no Go 1 and 2 are go games that include a story mode mimicking the manga and Anime plots. The AI is pretty bad, a whole 3 days of go playing is all you really need to trounce the computer. And all of this on 9x9 boards most of the time. Playing on a 19x19 is a terrible experience. the computer needs over a minute to think about every single move, wether it's completely obvious or not, and it is even a worse player than it is in 9x9. The games are good enough for people that are just then learning the game, but a 15 Kyu would have to play with obscene handicaps to get a challenging game. It's been said that playing like that is actually BAD for your go game, since you end up setting stupid traps for the computer to fall into, and acting in a way that would be considered reckless against any human player.
Unfortunately, AFAIK none of the two candidates that have a real chance this time has said a thing against the DMCA. If it's all about judges, I don't think that either candidate will look for someone in favor of weak IP laws. Remember, the DMCA was passed under Clinton.
Most democrats are pro-hollywood, while the reps are pro big business. Outside of a few representatives like Rick Boucher, almost every single member of congress finds nothing wrong with the DMCA. Without a geek community that votes pro-technology every time, none of this is going to change. A few thousand exiled cubans make the major candidates be in favor of the embargo. Without a stance just as strong, things won't change in the digital rights arena.
The problem is, in an election like this one, who's in favor of 'throwing their vote away' for an issue like this? Not many. Thus, I'm pretty sure that things will not change for the better in the IP front regardless of who wins the presidency.
I guess he means harware wise. There's little question that power wise, the N64 and Gamecube beat their Sony counterparts when it comes down to hardware capabilites. Besides, isn't Mario 64 the quintessential launch title?. The GC launch titles were clearly weaker, but it's still not any worse than, let's say, PS2s.
Indymedia also likes to join any controversy in the anti-government side, no matter who is acrually right. For example, they are in favor if Basque independence, and call ETA detainees 'political prisioners'. Sure, political prisioners that bomb spaniards and french alike. There's no law against that, right?. If 15% of Texans wanted independence and a few of them bombed Chicago, would you call them freedom fighters? I'm pretty sure I wouldn't.
All in all, being in favor of things like this does indymedia more harm than good. When you favor bombings as a mean of getting more votes for a cause that loses every single election since 1975, you're not going to be making many friends.
While I find Fable to be a good, albeit short, game, it has very little to do with Zelda or havest moon. No 'dungeons', in the zelda sense, about 2 puzzles in the entire game, lack of a sense of exploration (you walk on 'tracks', no expansive countryside/ocean to explore. It's more like a more RPGish version of an action RPG like BG:Dark Alliance. If you're looking for Zelda+Harvest Moon, you're better off with Dark Cloud & Dark Cloud 2 for the PS2.
I agree, Morrowind is a unique, lengthy RPG. The only caveat is that items that items that increase your running speed are a key factor to have an enjoyable game. I recommend everyone that wants to give Morrowing a try to play a Breton and look for the location of the Boots of Blinding Speed in one of the many FAQs for the game. Once the walking speed becomes tolerable, there's a fantastic game hiding underneath.
$12 a ticket is not that strange in california. Last time I went to the bay area for work, the local theater was charging $12.50, as opposed to the $8 that you see in the most expensive theaters in the St.Louis area. Parking was not free, unlike in most of the midwest, where you'd only pay for parking downtown. People in the bay area are so used to inflated prices on almost everything, so those prices are really not out of the line. You can rent a 2 bedroom apartmen in STL for $500-$800 a month. Try to get the same thing for less than $1500 there.
There's no way in hell that San Andreas is going to sell out. There were MAJOR shortages on GTA3, but that's because nobody really expected it to be such a big hit. When Vice City came around most retailers expected it to sell like hotcakes so there were few stock problems. Considering that San Andreas is one of the very few big games released this october, and that the last GTA games have been selling well for more than a year after their release, I don't see how retailers are going to order to few copies of the game. It's just like not stocking enough copies of madden: it just doesn't happen in any major stores
Unless you preorder with the publisher himself somehow, preordering early doesn't really have any impact on the developer. Even if it did, none but the poorest development houses has serious budgetary problems: If you finish development more or less on time, like the GTA guys do, you won't have budget problems. The budget problems come only if the game is really, really late, (more than 6 months at least), or after the game has been released, when the game just doesn't sell well enough. Besides, who'd be insane enough to cut staff on a big name unreleased game?.
True, he did. I guess that a 'true' conservative would be for a small and restricted federal government. Those conservatives would probably cringe at something like the patriot act, that just gives stupidly high amounts of power to the executive branch for no good reason.IMO, any patriot would have voted against the PATRIOT act.
I'm pretty sure that a lot of democrats that prowl slashdot, given the option of a more traditional conservative like mcCain and Bush, would vote for the conservative just to get rid of GW.
I am afraid I wasn't clear. I didn't mean that one of the games was of poor quality. I've not played the PSP version of either, so any guesses on quality would not be very fair.What I meant is that, as a general rules, the people that buy golf games are not exactly into racing games, and vice versa. Thus, you get a bundle of 1 game you'll probably like, and one that you won't play at all, and that has a $0 trade value. Traditionally, bundled games had a really, really wide appeal at the time, like Sonic the Hedgehog and Mario 64.This two games would probably sell well on their own, but they don't quite sound like flagship, must-have titles to me.
I wonder what the Sony marketing team is thinking. Neither Golf games nor Need for Speed have the broad appeal that bundled games should have. As if the console didn't seem expensive enough anyway, they want us to get 2 games, at least 1 of which most people won't like.
If those games are really bundled with the system, they better have the option of buying the console for less without those games.
Not just an anime series, but also a comic book that is being distributed in the US already. The series is much better than it sounds, and doesn't really need you to understand go at all.
Flat taxes are great if you think that redistribution of wealth is bad and everyone has to take care only of their own hide. Then again, without redistribution of wealth, in a couple of generations you'd get to a point in which if your parents were poor, you are screwed. No medicine, no cheap higher education. It'd come down to getting your father's job, middle ages style.
Of course, anyone on their 30s who is making some good money like you do will not suffer any negative consequences, so why care about the future? I thought that the founding fathers's plan was a Land of Opportunity for everyone. Being able to live well if you worked hard, no matter how low you had to start from. I guess I missed the part where they talk about how you don't really have to do anything in life if your grandparent was loaded.
You should also learn the concept of disposable income. If I make $10,000 a year and rent an apartment, I might have, at best, a few hundred dollars of disposable income. Take 15% of my income from me, and I'm probably having to decide between clothes and food. If I get really sick, I'm fucked. On the other hand, If I make 100,000, I can easily dump over a thousand dollars a month in drinks, a stupidly big car, or do some drugs. Take 15% off of that, and instead of buying an escalade I might be stuck with a luxury sedan, and I might not be able to afford white powder. Not being able to afford coke is not quite the same thing as not being able to afford clothes.
The lack of a price range announcement IS a price range announcement IMO. If the PSP was going to cost $200-$250, the price would have been announced already. Do you think that a $350 price announcement would help them at all against the DS? I think that Nintendo would benefit from that kind of announcement more than Sony.
Sony is not the kind to hide good news, in fact, they'll overhype anything they have. Remember the PS2 as a supercomputer claims?. From their actions we can guess that it's going to be at least twice as expensive as the DS.
Most LCD manufacturers have slightly pricier LCD monitors with DVI interfaces. The problem is that most retail stores don't carry those models. In many locations, the only way you can buy one of those models is to buy online. Most online stores I've seen refuse LCD returns if they have any less than 6-12 dead pixels, while local stores accept returns for pretty much any reason.
At least 80% of the video cards you can buy in retail stores have a DVI output. Why don't these stores carry the DVI enabled version of the monitors they already have in stock?
I don't see a practical autopilot happening any time soon. I see how it'd work on a freeway, but what about construction zones?. Lanes get closed or reversed. You might have to follow the hand-made directions of the repair crew. A turn might be changed temporarely into a really weird angle that only human perception is nowadays able to descipher. By the time we can handle this kinds of things properly, the fact that drives can drive themselves would not be all that important compared to other applications of the image processing and AI technnologies.
It is true that 90% of current Halo fans still play it only for the multiplayer. However game magazines were also raving about the single player campaign. For example, this is what gamespot had to say about the game:
Halo is a complete thrill ride from beginning to end, an experience perhaps best described as a 16-hour-plus version of the siege scene from the film Terminator 2.[...]The single-player experience in Halo is so strong that it's easy to regard the multiplayer side of the game as secondary, and to a large extent, it is.
This doesn't seem to me like a comment regarding the multiplayer, does it?. I still don't know if the reviewer was receiving oral sex while he was playing or something: Some of the game's areas were so poorly designed that they are only marginally better than the first era in Daikatana. While not a terrible game as a whole, (as you said, the multiplayer game is better than the single player) the reviewers did seem to be pretty wrong with this one.
Yep, really poor customer relations. He does have a point though: It is possible to be running Nero's disk image software if you are using the CD version of the game (as opposed to the DVD version). I've been running it fine with no problems w/o having to use a nocd patch.
I really see no point of this kind of copy protection though: The warez guys had the game online at least 3 days before it hit stores. Casual copiers using crappy disk image programs will not get past more primitive copy protection mechanisms, and anyone inbetween will just get a nocd crack from the usual sites. They are only hurting paying customers... again.
H1B hurting salaries for engineers? Last time I checked, H1Bs were paid about the same as normal developers. In fact, I've seen H1Bs making 15% more than a similarly qualified american.
The H1B program actually helps the american programmer: Without it, all of those H1Bs you see around here would be working for outsourcing compaines in their home countries, competing with you with an even smaller salary. In effect, the US can use the program to make the best foreign programmers compete with you in a more even ground, all while they are paying medicare and social security taxes, just like any American does. Given equal skill, I'd rather compete with someone that might make only 5% less than I do than with someone that makes less than half of that.
Slashdot Mirror
Not wanting to troll here, but after being horribly disappointed with the first one, I'm not playing the sequel.
The problem is that to change the current situations, the swing states have to change the way they cast their electoral votes. That's completely up to the states. If you were the governor of, let's say, Florida. Would you really want to push for a change that puts your state away from the spotlight? It might be for the greater good of the US, but the people that would lose the most out of the change are the ones that can make the decision. In the same way, republicans and democrats are the ones stopping instant runoff and condorcet voting: There's no way this change would help them.
That'd be really, really bad for me. I'm switching jobs, and I set things up so that I left my current job the 26 to start working the 8th, giving myself plenty of time to finish GTA!
Note to self, do not set up your life around projected release dates
You've find out that Gaelic was the inspiration for the classic flash animation A Jorb Well Done. Good jeooaogrb Homestead!
He's probably thinking about Tekken. There were plenty of time-release characters in the arcade versions of Tekken 2 and TT, if memory serves me right.
There are a few Go games for the GBA already. Hikaru no Go 1 and 2 are go games that include a story mode mimicking the manga and Anime plots. The AI is pretty bad, a whole 3 days of go playing is all you really need to trounce the computer. And all of this on 9x9 boards most of the time. Playing on a 19x19 is a terrible experience. the computer needs over a minute to think about every single move, wether it's completely obvious or not, and it is even a worse player than it is in 9x9. The games are good enough for people that are just then learning the game, but a 15 Kyu would have to play with obscene handicaps to get a challenging game. It's been said that playing like that is actually BAD for your go game, since you end up setting stupid traps for the computer to fall into, and acting in a way that would be considered reckless against any human player.
Unfortunately, AFAIK none of the two candidates that have a real chance this time has said a thing against the DMCA. If it's all about judges, I don't think that either candidate will look for someone in favor of weak IP laws. Remember, the DMCA was passed under Clinton.
Most democrats are pro-hollywood, while the reps are pro big business. Outside of a few representatives like Rick Boucher, almost every single member of congress finds nothing wrong with the DMCA. Without a geek community that votes pro-technology every time, none of this is going to change. A few thousand exiled cubans make the major candidates be in favor of the embargo. Without a stance just as strong, things won't change in the digital rights arena.
The problem is, in an election like this one, who's in favor of 'throwing their vote away' for an issue like this? Not many. Thus, I'm pretty sure that things will not change for the better in the IP front regardless of who wins the presidency.
I guess he means harware wise. There's little question that power wise, the N64 and Gamecube beat their Sony counterparts when it comes down to hardware capabilites. Besides, isn't Mario 64 the quintessential launch title?. The GC launch titles were clearly weaker, but it's still not any worse than, let's say, PS2s.
Indymedia also likes to join any controversy in the anti-government side, no matter who is acrually right. For example, they are in favor if Basque independence, and call ETA detainees 'political prisioners'. Sure, political prisioners that bomb spaniards and french alike. There's no law against that, right?. If 15% of Texans wanted independence and a few of them bombed Chicago, would you call them freedom fighters? I'm pretty sure I wouldn't.
All in all, being in favor of things like this does indymedia more harm than good. When you favor bombings as a mean of getting more votes for a cause that loses every single election since 1975, you're not going to be making many friends.
It has been modded funny, but those instructions ARE real. I guess they didn't try to hide the option all that hard.
While I find Fable to be a good, albeit short, game, it has very little to do with Zelda or havest moon. No 'dungeons', in the zelda sense, about 2 puzzles in the entire game, lack of a sense of exploration (you walk on 'tracks', no expansive countryside/ocean to explore. It's more like a more RPGish version of an action RPG like BG:Dark Alliance. If you're looking for Zelda+Harvest Moon, you're better off with Dark Cloud & Dark Cloud 2 for the PS2.
I agree, Morrowind is a unique, lengthy RPG. The only caveat is that items that items that increase your running speed are a key factor to have an enjoyable game. I recommend everyone that wants to give Morrowing a try to play a Breton and look for the location of the Boots of Blinding Speed in one of the many FAQs for the game. Once the walking speed becomes tolerable, there's a fantastic game hiding underneath.
$12 a ticket is not that strange in california. Last time I went to the bay area for work, the local theater was charging $12.50, as opposed to the $8 that you see in the most expensive theaters in the St.Louis area. Parking was not free, unlike in most of the midwest, where you'd only pay for parking downtown. People in the bay area are so used to inflated prices on almost everything, so those prices are really not out of the line. You can rent a 2 bedroom apartmen in STL for $500-$800 a month. Try to get the same thing for less than $1500 there.
There's no way in hell that San Andreas is going to sell out. There were MAJOR shortages on GTA3, but that's because nobody really expected it to be such a big hit. When Vice City came around most retailers expected it to sell like hotcakes so there were few stock problems. Considering that San Andreas is one of the very few big games released this october, and that the last GTA games have been selling well for more than a year after their release, I don't see how retailers are going to order to few copies of the game. It's just like not stocking enough copies of madden: it just doesn't happen in any major stores
Unless you preorder with the publisher himself somehow, preordering early doesn't really have any impact on the developer. Even if it did, none but the poorest development houses has serious budgetary problems: If you finish development more or less on time, like the GTA guys do, you won't have budget problems. The budget problems come only if the game is really, really late, (more than 6 months at least), or after the game has been released, when the game just doesn't sell well enough. Besides, who'd be insane enough to cut staff on a big name unreleased game?.
True, he did. I guess that a 'true' conservative would be for a small and restricted federal government. Those conservatives would probably cringe at something like the patriot act, that just gives stupidly high amounts of power to the executive branch for no good reason.IMO, any patriot would have voted against the PATRIOT act.
I'm pretty sure that a lot of democrats that prowl slashdot, given the option of a more traditional conservative like mcCain and Bush, would vote for the conservative just to get rid of GW.
I am afraid I wasn't clear. I didn't mean that one of the games was of poor quality. I've not played the PSP version of either, so any guesses on quality would not be very fair.What I meant is that, as a general rules, the people that buy golf games are not exactly into racing games, and vice versa. Thus, you get a bundle of 1 game you'll probably like, and one that you won't play at all, and that has a $0 trade value. Traditionally, bundled games had a really, really wide appeal at the time, like Sonic the Hedgehog and Mario 64.This two games would probably sell well on their own, but they don't quite sound like flagship, must-have titles to me.
I hope it makes more sense now
I wonder what the Sony marketing team is thinking. Neither Golf games nor Need for Speed have the broad appeal that bundled games should have. As if the console didn't seem expensive enough anyway, they want us to get 2 games, at least 1 of which most people won't like.
If those games are really bundled with the system, they better have the option of buying the console for less without those games.
Not just an anime series, but also a comic book that is being distributed in the US already. The series is much better than it sounds, and doesn't really need you to understand go at all.
Flat taxes are great if you think that redistribution of wealth is bad and everyone has to take care only of their own hide. Then again, without redistribution of wealth, in a couple of generations you'd get to a point in which if your parents were poor, you are screwed. No medicine, no cheap higher education. It'd come down to getting your father's job, middle ages style.
Of course, anyone on their 30s who is making some good money like you do will not suffer any negative consequences, so why care about the future? I thought that the founding fathers's plan was a Land of Opportunity for everyone. Being able to live well if you worked hard, no matter how low you had to start from. I guess I missed the part where they talk about how you don't really have to do anything in life if your grandparent was loaded.
You should also learn the concept of disposable income. If I make $10,000 a year and rent an apartment, I might have, at best, a few hundred dollars of disposable income. Take 15% of my income from me, and I'm probably having to decide between clothes and food. If I get really sick, I'm fucked. On the other hand, If I make 100,000, I can easily dump over a thousand dollars a month in drinks, a stupidly big car, or do some drugs. Take 15% off of that, and instead of buying an escalade I might be stuck with a luxury sedan, and I might not be able to afford white powder. Not being able to afford coke is not quite the same thing as not being able to afford clothes.
The lack of a price range announcement IS a price range announcement IMO. If the PSP was going to cost $200-$250, the price would have been announced already. Do you think that a $350 price announcement would help them at all against the DS? I think that Nintendo would benefit from that kind of announcement more than Sony.
Sony is not the kind to hide good news, in fact, they'll overhype anything they have. Remember the PS2 as a supercomputer claims?. From their actions we can guess that it's going to be at least twice as expensive as the DS.
Most LCD manufacturers have slightly pricier LCD monitors with DVI interfaces. The problem is that most retail stores don't carry those models. In many locations, the only way you can buy one of those models is to buy online. Most online stores I've seen refuse LCD returns if they have any less than 6-12 dead pixels, while local stores accept returns for pretty much any reason.
At least 80% of the video cards you can buy in retail stores have a DVI output. Why don't these stores carry the DVI enabled version of the monitors they already have in stock?
I don't see a practical autopilot happening any time soon. I see how it'd work on a freeway, but what about construction zones?. Lanes get closed or reversed. You might have to follow the hand-made directions of the repair crew. A turn might be changed temporarely into a really weird angle that only human perception is nowadays able to descipher. By the time we can handle this kinds of things properly, the fact that drives can drive themselves would not be all that important compared to other applications of the image processing and AI technnologies.
It is true that 90% of current Halo fans still play it only for the multiplayer. However game magazines were also raving about the single player campaign. For example, this is what gamespot had to say about the game:
This doesn't seem to me like a comment regarding the multiplayer, does it?. I still don't know if the reviewer was receiving oral sex while he was playing or something: Some of the game's areas were so poorly designed that they are only marginally better than the first era in Daikatana. While not a terrible game as a whole, (as you said, the multiplayer game is better than the single player) the reviewers did seem to be pretty wrong with this one.
Yep, really poor customer relations. He does have a point though: It is possible to be running Nero's disk image software if you are using the CD version of the game (as opposed to the DVD version). I've been running it fine with no problems w/o having to use a nocd patch.
I really see no point of this kind of copy protection though: The warez guys had the game online at least 3 days before it hit stores. Casual copiers using crappy disk image programs will not get past more primitive copy protection mechanisms, and anyone inbetween will just get a nocd crack from the usual sites. They are only hurting paying customers... again.
H1B hurting salaries for engineers? Last time I checked, H1Bs were paid about the same as normal developers. In fact, I've seen H1Bs making 15% more than a similarly qualified american.
The H1B program actually helps the american programmer: Without it, all of those H1Bs you see around here would be working for outsourcing compaines in their home countries, competing with you with an even smaller salary. In effect, the US can use the program to make the best foreign programmers compete with you in a more even ground, all while they are paying medicare and social security taxes, just like any American does. Given equal skill, I'd rather compete with someone that might make only 5% less than I do than with someone that makes less than half of that.