It's kind of like when you buy a "new to you" car. It'll be a year or two old, have around 15,000 miles on it, and have the most annoying radio station ever programmed to all six buttons and the page in the manual that tells how to program the buttons missing. But it's "New to you," so the dealer just drops the "to you" part and calls it new.
I read EULAs. Usually not when I'm installing something, unless I suspect it may have spyware. I've never found any good easter eggs, just things like being required to upgrade to a new version after n months, being required to grant physical access to my computer on request, and some weird things like not being able to uninstall third party applications on the same partition.
Keep in mind Sega still has a very large arcade business. The Dreamcast is still alive in the arcade. That and they recently merged with a pachinko company, and pachinko is freakishly profitable in Japan. Their game sales are also up, since they're developing on a number of platforms, instead of just a single console which was being outsold by either Nintendo or Sony (if not both) at nearly every turn.
Those are also good reasons that Nintendo won't be bought by Microsoft. They've got dominance in the mobile market, but I'll admit (I don't like to admit, but I will) that that dominance is probably not going to last out the year.
Even so, Nintendo's not going anywhere. They survived major screwups in the past because they're a huge company, and remember that video games aren't their only product. Nintendo's been around since 1889, and they have a lot of power behind them.
The worst thing that I see happening to Nintendo (it's still years off if it happens, but the PSP just might be the deciding factor one way or the other) is that they'll go the way of Sega - not making systems anymore, but producing their games accross multiple other systems. They have the franchise power, and I believe they still have the genius in there somewhere to make truely new things.
Mario on the Xbox? Pokemon on the PSP? Zelda on the PC? Hell, I never thought I'd see Sonic and Mario on the same system in my lifetime, but it's happened, and I think Sega is better for it in the long run.
Not true. Anybody can challenge a law. The ACLU does it all the time. Many of the laws they challenge deal with individual freedoms, and the ACLU has no way to become a victim of them, but they can still challenge them and they do succeed.
What's screwed up with the legal system is that in order to successfully challenge a law, you need a bigger lobby than the people who pushed it through.
Normally I'd say that that's pretty much how business works, and I'll settle for getting my stuff fixed (If I had one anyway). In this case, though, this comes as kind of sour news to me after Sony decreed that this wasn't a problem but an intentional feature and that the users have to get used to it.
I've yet to see Sony say anything about the shuriken drive. It seems to me that that could cause a lot more damage to the device than a stuck key. I pried the A button back up on my NES controller with a screwdriver when it had the same problem the PSP buttons are having and it worked just fine (until it was destroyed during a 4 AM fight with Gannon with no recent saves, but that's another story).
I'd hardly call it acive. Last time I played was in high school, and it was 1.09 then. Three patches in three years. Still, can't knock them for fixing problems with such an old game. It didn't have that many problems left anymore, and I wouldn't have faulted them if they'd stopped releasing updates way back after 1.07.
They do try. The Saginaw Spirit hocky team tried to buy exclusive use of our public ice rink a while back (not the rink itself, just wanted it closed to the public for the three months of the year that people occasionally go there so they can practice). Thankfully, they're even more broke than the city and couldn't afford it, since the city council just loves to sell public facilities. Dr. Shaheen (rich retired doctor who's into real estate in the area) has bought most of them. It's not always a bad thing when a businessman buys a public facility, though. All the ones Shaheen bought are still public facilities, it's just that they're clean now. That's more than can be said for the Court Theatre.
It's stalemate if the player is currently not in check, but any move will put him into check. In the 2x2 chess setup, white starts in check, and any move he makes results in him still being in check, and is thus illegal. My diagrams broke last time because I had it on HTML, so here it is in plain text:
Start: QK QK
White at the bottom, first move, he can do four things: He can use either his king or queen to capture one of the other two pieces. However, both the black king and queen check the white king currently. Whichever one he captures, his king is still in check, and thus the move is illegal in standard rules, and the game ends in checkmate. White can't finish their turn, so black wins:
Queen takes queen:
QK
K Black king still checks white king, so this move is illegal.
King takes queen: KK Q Same as above, black king checks white king, this move is also illegal.
Queen takes king: QQ
K Black queen checks white, so you can't do this.
King takes king: QK Q White is still in check by the black queen here.
Any way you play it, white is in checkmate. So is black, but by the rules, since white can't get out of check before ending his turn, he looses.
If you're going by blitz rules, then you have the same four options, but they're all legal, since you don't call check in blitz anyway. I've had situations where I've had somebody in check for several turns in a blitz game and not realized it until afterwards, and even more where I've been in check and not been able to immediately counter it and spent a couple turns in sheer agony hoping they don't notice it.. If you capture the black king, you win. If you make a serious mistake and capture the queen for some stupid reason, black king takes black king next turn and white looses.
Then we come to the unbelievably unlikly reason that, having just seen such a stupid mistake made, black then proceeds to capture the white queen, thus putting the ball back into white's court to pave the way for even more stupid mistakes. I suppose it could take nine turns to win a 2x2 chess game, but you'd have to be very drunk to accomplish that.
Actually, the fact that Go only has two pieces is why it's so much more complex. Chess pieces individual behavior is what usually limits the number of moves in Chess.
Also, since Chess doesn't easily scale down, 2x2 chess doesn't work:
QK
QK
Neither side can move, since any move they make still leaves their king in check. I guess that means that White looses by default, since White goes first and can't make a legal move. Unless you play by rules like with blitz and don't count check, only actually capturing the king, in which case White always wins (unless he's REALLY dumb).
Yeah, I checked after the replies, you're right. I just assumed the dozen posts that said 20x20 were right without bothering to look it up. I suck at the game, even worse than I do with chess, so I never pay attention to it anymore.
People on Slashdot probably fall into a different demographic, but I've found that people generally haven't heard of Go. They'll recognize a chess set by site, but they see Go and if you're lucky they assume Reversi or Othello. I was in the student lounge with a friend who was teaching me how to play Go, and somebody asked what game we were playing. When we told him, his reply was, "Go? I thought that was a card game."
The one that come sto mind is Zophar.net. I know there were a couple others, but I can't think of which ones. None of them are ones I go to regularly, so it's yet to concern me much.
Pursue the influence lines, and you'll see the weaknesses of the game start to come out. The characters just aren't as dynamic as they were in KOTOR1, and don't really progress very much, except Visas and to a slight extent, Handmaiden.
Anyway, the ending is pretty lame story-wise, but I do have to admit that Darth Treya was very cool, with the three levitating lightsabres taht fly around the room at you and have to be independently "killed." Been since Die by the Sword since I've seen an enemy like those.
I don't think there is liquid magma, since all the papers and articles from probes that I've read have never said anything about significant activity like earthquakes (Marsquakes?). Also, the lack of a substantial mangnetic field suggests a solid core (Venus, on the other hand, lacks a magnetic field because it's rotational rate is so slow). Venus also shows signs of relatively recent and catastrophic volcanic activity. It's atmostphere is volcanic, it has very few craters on its surface, and those that are there are young and well-defined. It doesn't have older partially eroded craters, but there are a few partially covered in lava flows or with their rims still protruding above lava fields. The youngest Martian lava flows are older and smaller, suggesting not only a lack of recent activity, but a decline in activity before it stopped.
Anyway, like you said, this IS, nonetheless, probably our best bet for finding existing life, or signs of past life. It doesn't neccessarily take heat for life to survive, although life in every form we've encountered thus far (Not that we really have an abundance of data to go on) at least required heat to start, which Mars once had just as much as Earth. Near the equator, it's not that cold. The conditions in those ice packs may be no worse than some arctic conditions on Earth. Life probably couldn't form there, but it could certainly survive there.
It's my understanding that Mozilla was designed with 20/20 hindsight, and got rid of all the ways that websites annoyed users through IE. It's just that the advertisers were a bit more resourceful than I would have thought, and managed to pull a new rabit out of their hat just for non-IE users. I've been seeing popups with Firefox for a couple months on certain sites, and now on a few others as well. Interestingly, if I use IE for those same sites, I get a other popups, but I don't get the ones that I was getting under Firefox.
Anyway, I'm not too concerned. I don't doubt that an update or plugin will be made soon to stop even these, if one's not already out and I just haven't noticed.
They released it, but they did not cover all the pre-orders. They barely shipped as many copies as there were pre-orders, if that, and some copies ended up in retail.
Frankenmuth, Michigan has like 10,000 people not counting tourists and the prison (If it's still open, they might have moved them up to the TCCF), which more than qualifies for "small town." If you call 911 on something like this, the police might flag the license plate number of the guy you reported (if he's pulled over ever again, he's not supposed to get a warning), but they won't go track him down. They will, however, slap you with a very hefty fine, which is guaranteed. They just call the phone company and it's added as a special charge to your phone bill along with a number to call if you want to contest it (Which is usually a bad idea. Even the most permissive judges in the state who let people off with a warning on their 10th DUI don't play games with 911 abuse anymore, and the statutory maximum they can slap you with is something like $25,000 and 14 days in jail. Saginaw judges especially just love statutory limits, and will throw the whole thing at you and leave you to try and bargain it down on appeal. I think that if somebody dies because an ambulance, police cruiser, or fire truck is unnavailable, and one that could have responded is on an unjustified call, the 911 abuser responsible for that call can even get hit with wrongful death.
They want to raise their sales IN the US, OUTSIDE of Japan. Sorry, I type fast when it's about a company that's made me angry. Whenever they actually come out with something that isn't another FF game, they either don't ship enough copies outside of Japan or they don't ship ANY copies outside of Japan.
So they want to raise their sales outside of the US. Let me know when they're ready to honor or refund my pre-order of Valkyrie Profile from four years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
It's kind of like when you buy a "new to you" car. It'll be a year or two old, have around 15,000 miles on it, and have the most annoying radio station ever programmed to all six buttons and the page in the manual that tells how to program the buttons missing. But it's "New to you," so the dealer just drops the "to you" part and calls it new.
From KOTOR's item description of Lightsabers: "Only usable by Jedi. Untrained weilders are far more likely to injure themselves than an enemy."
I read EULAs. Usually not when I'm installing something, unless I suspect it may have spyware. I've never found any good easter eggs, just things like being required to upgrade to a new version after n months, being required to grant physical access to my computer on request, and some weird things like not being able to uninstall third party applications on the same partition.
Keep in mind Sega still has a very large arcade business. The Dreamcast is still alive in the arcade. That and they recently merged with a pachinko company, and pachinko is freakishly profitable in Japan. Their game sales are also up, since they're developing on a number of platforms, instead of just a single console which was being outsold by either Nintendo or Sony (if not both) at nearly every turn.
Those are also good reasons that Nintendo won't be bought by Microsoft. They've got dominance in the mobile market, but I'll admit (I don't like to admit, but I will) that that dominance is probably not going to last out the year.
Even so, Nintendo's not going anywhere. They survived major screwups in the past because they're a huge company, and remember that video games aren't their only product. Nintendo's been around since 1889, and they have a lot of power behind them.
The worst thing that I see happening to Nintendo (it's still years off if it happens, but the PSP just might be the deciding factor one way or the other) is that they'll go the way of Sega - not making systems anymore, but producing their games accross multiple other systems. They have the franchise power, and I believe they still have the genius in there somewhere to make truely new things.
Mario on the Xbox? Pokemon on the PSP? Zelda on the PC? Hell, I never thought I'd see Sonic and Mario on the same system in my lifetime, but it's happened, and I think Sega is better for it in the long run.
Not true. Anybody can challenge a law. The ACLU does it all the time. Many of the laws they challenge deal with individual freedoms, and the ACLU has no way to become a victim of them, but they can still challenge them and they do succeed. What's screwed up with the legal system is that in order to successfully challenge a law, you need a bigger lobby than the people who pushed it through.
Normally I'd say that that's pretty much how business works, and I'll settle for getting my stuff fixed (If I had one anyway). In this case, though, this comes as kind of sour news to me after Sony decreed that this wasn't a problem but an intentional feature and that the users have to get used to it. I've yet to see Sony say anything about the shuriken drive. It seems to me that that could cause a lot more damage to the device than a stuck key. I pried the A button back up on my NES controller with a screwdriver when it had the same problem the PSP buttons are having and it worked just fine (until it was destroyed during a 4 AM fight with Gannon with no recent saves, but that's another story).
I'd hardly call it acive. Last time I played was in high school, and it was 1.09 then. Three patches in three years. Still, can't knock them for fixing problems with such an old game. It didn't have that many problems left anymore, and I wouldn't have faulted them if they'd stopped releasing updates way back after 1.07.
They do try. The Saginaw Spirit hocky team tried to buy exclusive use of our public ice rink a while back (not the rink itself, just wanted it closed to the public for the three months of the year that people occasionally go there so they can practice). Thankfully, they're even more broke than the city and couldn't afford it, since the city council just loves to sell public facilities. Dr. Shaheen (rich retired doctor who's into real estate in the area) has bought most of them. It's not always a bad thing when a businessman buys a public facility, though. All the ones Shaheen bought are still public facilities, it's just that they're clean now. That's more than can be said for the Court Theatre.
It's stalemate if the player is currently not in check, but any move will put him into check. In the 2x2 chess setup, white starts in check, and any move he makes results in him still being in check, and is thus illegal. My diagrams broke last time because I had it on HTML, so here it is in plain text:
Start:
QK
QK
White at the bottom, first move, he can do four things: He can use either his king or queen to capture one of the other two pieces. However, both the black king and queen check the white king currently.
Whichever one he captures, his king is still in check, and thus the move is illegal in standard rules, and the game ends in checkmate. White can't finish their turn, so black wins:
Queen takes queen:
QK
K
Black king still checks white king, so this move is illegal.
King takes queen:
KK
Q
Same as above, black king checks white king, this move is also illegal.
Queen takes king:
QQ
K
Black queen checks white, so you can't do this.
King takes king:
QK
Q
White is still in check by the black queen here.
Any way you play it, white is in checkmate. So is black, but by the rules, since white can't get out of check before ending his turn, he looses.
If you're going by blitz rules, then you have the same four options, but they're all legal, since you don't call check in blitz anyway. I've had situations where I've had somebody in check for several turns in a blitz game and not realized it until afterwards, and even more where I've been in check and not been able to immediately counter it and spent a couple turns in sheer agony hoping they don't notice it.. If you capture the black king, you win. If you make a serious mistake and capture the queen for some stupid reason, black king takes black king next turn and white looses.
Then we come to the unbelievably unlikly reason that, having just seen such a stupid mistake made, black then proceeds to capture the white queen, thus putting the ball back into white's court to pave the way for even more stupid mistakes. I suppose it could take nine turns to win a 2x2 chess game, but you'd have to be very drunk to accomplish that.
Actually, the fact that Go only has two pieces is why it's so much more complex. Chess pieces individual behavior is what usually limits the number of moves in Chess. Also, since Chess doesn't easily scale down, 2x2 chess doesn't work: QK QK Neither side can move, since any move they make still leaves their king in check. I guess that means that White looses by default, since White goes first and can't make a legal move. Unless you play by rules like with blitz and don't count check, only actually capturing the king, in which case White always wins (unless he's REALLY dumb).
Yeah, I checked after the replies, you're right. I just assumed the dozen posts that said 20x20 were right without bothering to look it up. I suck at the game, even worse than I do with chess, so I never pay attention to it anymore.
It's 20x20. 19 squares, but Go is played on the vertecies, not the tiles, so it's 20x20.
People on Slashdot probably fall into a different demographic, but I've found that people generally haven't heard of Go. They'll recognize a chess set by site, but they see Go and if you're lucky they assume Reversi or Othello. I was in the student lounge with a friend who was teaching me how to play Go, and somebody asked what game we were playing. When we told him, his reply was, "Go? I thought that was a card game."
The one that come sto mind is Zophar.net. I know there were a couple others, but I can't think of which ones. None of them are ones I go to regularly, so it's yet to concern me much.
Pursue the influence lines, and you'll see the weaknesses of the game start to come out. The characters just aren't as dynamic as they were in KOTOR1, and don't really progress very much, except Visas and to a slight extent, Handmaiden. Anyway, the ending is pretty lame story-wise, but I do have to admit that Darth Treya was very cool, with the three levitating lightsabres taht fly around the room at you and have to be independently "killed." Been since Die by the Sword since I've seen an enemy like those.
Hey, hey, now, KOTOR was a damn fine game. KOTOR2 would have been so much better if they'd spent, say, another four or five months on it.
That's called fraud at best and extortion at worst. Yes, it's hardly theft - it's something that carries a somewhat higher penalty*.
*penalty may vary by state, municipality, and how expensive your lawyer is
I don't think there is liquid magma, since all the papers and articles from probes that I've read have never said anything about significant activity like earthquakes (Marsquakes?). Also, the lack of a substantial mangnetic field suggests a solid core (Venus, on the other hand, lacks a magnetic field because it's rotational rate is so slow). Venus also shows signs of relatively recent and catastrophic volcanic activity. It's atmostphere is volcanic, it has very few craters on its surface, and those that are there are young and well-defined. It doesn't have older partially eroded craters, but there are a few partially covered in lava flows or with their rims still protruding above lava fields. The youngest Martian lava flows are older and smaller, suggesting not only a lack of recent activity, but a decline in activity before it stopped. Anyway, like you said, this IS, nonetheless, probably our best bet for finding existing life, or signs of past life. It doesn't neccessarily take heat for life to survive, although life in every form we've encountered thus far (Not that we really have an abundance of data to go on) at least required heat to start, which Mars once had just as much as Earth. Near the equator, it's not that cold. The conditions in those ice packs may be no worse than some arctic conditions on Earth. Life probably couldn't form there, but it could certainly survive there.
It's my understanding that Mozilla was designed with 20/20 hindsight, and got rid of all the ways that websites annoyed users through IE. It's just that the advertisers were a bit more resourceful than I would have thought, and managed to pull a new rabit out of their hat just for non-IE users. I've been seeing popups with Firefox for a couple months on certain sites, and now on a few others as well. Interestingly, if I use IE for those same sites, I get a other popups, but I don't get the ones that I was getting under Firefox.
Anyway, I'm not too concerned. I don't doubt that an update or plugin will be made soon to stop even these, if one's not already out and I just haven't noticed.
They released it, but they did not cover all the pre-orders. They barely shipped as many copies as there were pre-orders, if that, and some copies ended up in retail.
The one here delivers. Theoretically. I still haven't gotten my medium supreme from December. i think it's free if they're not there within a month.
Frankenmuth, Michigan has like 10,000 people not counting tourists and the prison (If it's still open, they might have moved them up to the TCCF), which more than qualifies for "small town." If you call 911 on something like this, the police might flag the license plate number of the guy you reported (if he's pulled over ever again, he's not supposed to get a warning), but they won't go track him down. They will, however, slap you with a very hefty fine, which is guaranteed. They just call the phone company and it's added as a special charge to your phone bill along with a number to call if you want to contest it (Which is usually a bad idea. Even the most permissive judges in the state who let people off with a warning on their 10th DUI don't play games with 911 abuse anymore, and the statutory maximum they can slap you with is something like $25,000 and 14 days in jail. Saginaw judges especially just love statutory limits, and will throw the whole thing at you and leave you to try and bargain it down on appeal. I think that if somebody dies because an ambulance, police cruiser, or fire truck is unnavailable, and one that could have responded is on an unjustified call, the 911 abuser responsible for that call can even get hit with wrongful death.
They want to raise their sales IN the US, OUTSIDE of Japan. Sorry, I type fast when it's about a company that's made me angry. Whenever they actually come out with something that isn't another FF game, they either don't ship enough copies outside of Japan or they don't ship ANY copies outside of Japan.
So they want to raise their sales outside of the US. Let me know when they're ready to honor or refund my pre-order of Valkyrie Profile from four years ago.