Actually, you don't. I've had my population completely wiped out, and been in debt, and it doesn't end. You don't have to quit playing then, it's just kind of boring when you have no income and not enough money to even lay a power line down.
They never billed it as realistic. In fact, they didn't even bill it as a game, but as a toy, mainly because there is no winning or losing, just playing.
There are simulations that a real city planner can use to learn about city planning. Just like there are extremely realistic flight, driving, and even spaceflight simulators. The reason they very rarely try to package up those simulations and sell them as games is that they're not very fun. You have to know how to fly the plane to ever get it off the ground, you have to actually know how to plan a city, or else you won't last very long.
If an urban planner needs a training simulation, I wouldn't think that one that makes more llama jokes than anything else should be very high on his list.
H2 didn't kill people in the Hindinburg. Neither did fire, in fact. The hydrogen burned extremely fast and rose very rapidly upwards, away from the passengers. Most of the passengers were crushed to death under the collapsing structure of the airship, rather than burned to death in the fire.
From what they were saying about "XBox TV" a few weeks back, combined with these RSS feeds and integrated into the Xbox Live system, it could very well amount to the equivalent of the amateur leagues in sports at the very least. If it were segregated in some level by region, it would be even moreso. For example, in the amateur sports leagues, there are often a lot more players than the big leagues, but tend to have a few stand-outs overall, and many local areas will have a few outstanding players or teams. They aren't as well known as the star quarterback for the nearest big league football team, and would probably never be recognized on the street outside their home town, but they get enough recognition that if they walk into a local sports bar, they can nab drinks on the house.
A system like that could be automated to a limited extent. People could look at the best players' games, or they could limit it to games with players in their area.
Televised stuff would probably stay limited to the best professional competitive players in a semi-organized league, I think. Things like the top quarter of the players in one of the bit conventions maybe (Like with any tournament, the lower you go in the rankings, the more sheer airtime it takes to broadcast, so you usually have to cut it off fairly high, and do a highlight reel of the lower levels of the tournament to show how far the remaining players have come).
The main problem with coupling just stuff off Xbox Live with TV broadcast is that a lot of people on Xbox live aren't good players (and a lot more are just idiots), so you have a very low ratio of games worth televising to those that aren't, and a hard time to sift through to find the good games and still be fair and not overrepresent a few players who play either very well or just very much.
One way or the other, unless the population in general can find a way to be inspired by gamers or driven to some level of team loyalty (the way people in Detroit get angry any time you point out how badly the Lions and Tigers have been doing the last decade or so), it'll be limited to gamers gaining recognition among other gamers. Not a bad thing at all, and I'd like it a lot, but its still a closed community in that case, and there's no real gain in overall recognition or legitamacy as a sport.
Same thing applies on TechTV: The bulk of its viewers are gamers already, and I seriously doubt anybody who doesn't like video games watches it. People who do well enough to make it on the air will gain some recognition as gamers, but it won't be the sort of, "Hey, check it out, it's the Saginaw County Quake Champion at table six!" sort of recognition that can come from even amateur sports. MTV might be one channel that would buy into broadcasting games. They've usually been willing to try new things to try to appeal to adolescent audeinces. It's a step up, but again, you're broadcasting to an audience that probably largely accepts games already. Then is the fact that it's MTV. I remember a somewhat hostile response to MTV's video game awards by some gamers.
I think to gain widespread recognition and acceptance on par with other sports, it'd have to make it onto more mainstream media that nongamers, and particularly nongamers outside the typical gamer age range watch. ESPN and other sports networks already carries some little league and minor league sports, as well as less recognized sports like paintball, poker, fishing, and so on. Hell, I saw a four hour caber toss tournament on ESPN once, so they're not afraid of investing considerable airtime into unusual things (Unusual to a mostly US audience, anyway)
Not saying it can't be done, though. If log rolling, burger eating, and sharpshooting can make it to ESPN, I see no reason why Quake or WarCraft can't also. It'll really just take a network exec willing to risk a couple hours a week and a few advertising slots in prime time to try it out.
How if Farscape not funny? Between Rygel constantly commenting on how he'd take good care of everybody's stuff when they died and D'argo and John's constant Odd Couple style bickering (not to mention Scorpius and his S&M suit), it was funnier than any of the bland humor in SG1. I laughed my ass off three times when John and Aeryn were arguing. Aeryn called John a Dranit, and he asked, "What the hell's a Dranit?" "You really don't know what a Dranit is?" when she refused to explain the insult, he said "Fine, screw the Dranit!" She laughed at him and said, "You REALLY don't know what a Dranit is." Unfortunately, the show was cancelled before anybody offered a satisfactory explanation of exactly what a Dranit is.
Most of "t3h funneh" on SG1 is too forced. They constantly detour away from the plot just to make a joke that doesn't fit with the flow, and isn't really that funny. Most of it doesn't fit the context, either.
Some more reassuring words: Black holes don't last forever either. Even if the entire universe is eventually collected into them, they still "give off" Hawking radiation when they caputure half of a virtual particle pair, but not the other. Even though the escaping particle did not actually come from the black hole, it can be shown that its energy did. Even though the black hole captured a particle, it actually lost mass equivalent to that partcile.
Granted we're talking about timespawns on the order of 10^freakishly-large-number, and even then, a gigantic black hole might be a lot more interesting than a lot of weakly interacting particles.
Excessively low, I should think. Only 1300 solar masses. Even a tiny dwarf galaxy would be millions of solar masses. Also, they tend to get torn apart rather than crushed in the process of being "swallowed."
What the other poster said. But even if things where like you said, this is a 1600 solar mass black hole orbiting a 2.6 million solar mass black hole at a distance of 3 light years. At galactic distances, they can be approximated as a single 2.6016 million solar mass object. It's just not big enough to matter in that respect.
Incriminating how? I don't buy that its real either, but this is the sort of stuff this guy says when he talks. He's not exactly the sharpest bulb on the tree.
I used a simmilar metaphor (using IE without a firewall is like having unprotected group sex blindfolded was the one I used). One person I told this two actually STOPPED using Mozilla, though, so I tend to stay away from the sex metaphors now.
Probably not. Jennings has made it as far as he has because he knows a little bit about seemingly everything, whereas Peek effectively knows everything about a narrow set of fifteen subjects. Jeopardy covers a wide set of subjects in each game (sixteen categories per show, usually one or two of which is a sort of grab bag where all the answers have an O in them or something, but cover completely unrelated topics), with relatively little repeat subjects from show to show. Somebody with a lot of knowledge about a few subjects can win one or two shows if the topics go their way, but they'll lose in the long run because the topics change dramatically.
You can get that in the US too. Not sure if the coverage is as good as in Australia, though. And you also have to worry about insurance companies poking around taking pictures through your windows. They'll do anything to catch you moving furniture, rotating your matress, or carrying heavy cases of beer into all the parties your employer assumes you're having with all your free money/time. Again, not sure if they do this in Australia or not.
It'll beat the N-Gage, but that isn't saying much. If the PSP does even worse than I expect, it might have a distant shot at pulling #2 in the US market like the Xbox did. But, I think the PSP will do at least Game Gear decent, leaving this thing (hell, I can't even remember its name already) high and dry.
I've never seen a giant check with an account number on it. Mine just had 000 00000 000, which is the same thing they put on the sample checks they give you at the bank.
I'd say things are a bit closer to what the article says than you think, but you're on the right track - google gives in to almost any pressure in a heartbeat. Google's always been perfectly willing to throw up the "This search has items removed which may be in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act" things in results. I've been getting them more and more often on various things. If you get creative with your search terms, you can come up with a lot of different messages about why some results were omitted from a search. I've never seen any of that on other search engines.
I got one of those giant checks for about $10 once from a sweepsakes that I might have won $100,000 in, but didn't really read all the fine print so I'm not sure exactly. The giant check isn't the real check - they don't have any of the markings on the back, and they even say, "NON NEGOTIABLE" in non-giant print at the bottom. You get to keep that one, and buy a giant picture frame in and hang it on the wall or something. They give you a real, normal-size check to cash.
You happen to live in Saginaw? There were a lot of people being turned away because the pollers claimed they weren't on the list. There were unhappy crowds at a couple sites well after midnight, and the police ended up escorting a lot of people into polling sites and checking the lists themselves. Of course, nearly all the people turned away were on the lists.
Several presincts were telling people they were supposed to vote at other locations when they weren't, and refusing to allow them to vote.
As a side-note, in an attempt to add injury to insult, the pro-life people were putting bumper stickers on people's windshields, and I was late for work trying to scrape them off so I could see (They put them at head-level, centered over the steering wheel, so I couldn't drive without getting them off).
A lot of the humor is accidental, usually caused by bad translation and localization. Things like Arngrim thanking the king from the bottom of his feet, wizards attacking spoony bards, and somebody setting up us the bomb.
They won't just lose Xbox stuff. So I can't buy my Xbox games there, I'll go accross the street to Walmart, or down half a mile to Target (all three are on the same damn block of Titabawasee in Saginaw). While I'm there, I might as well get my other games there. And I'm out of beer, so I'll get that. Hell, as long as the cart's half full, I'll get my groceries while I'm here. Oh, that's a cool shirt, I'll buy that.
Before long, I have the Target shopper's card and stop carrying my Meijer discount card because I don't need it anymore. If I went to Meijer, it would just mean an extra hop over someplace else to look for Xbox games.
You're not missing much anymore. The ones in Saginaw, Midland, and Flint have gone to hell the last couple years. The Saginaw Tittabawassee location started some renovations a few years ago, and half the store's been lit with utility lights ever since. The same one was losing lots of money because people were stealing flowers from the garden department (which is set up so you can go outside from it without passing the checkout lanes). So they moved it to the back of the store, and put the drug isle in its place. Guess how much they're losing now when you can walk from isle with some of the most expensive and often stolen items in the store outside without passing the checkout lanes?
Wait until its out to see what PA has to say. They rip on everything that isn't out yet. Look at how they went after the Xbox, but after it came out, they didn't say anything about it except a couple comments on the old controllers.
I agree. The DS has, compared to the PS2 and its shortages, come out of nowhere. Just a few months ago, we didn't know what it'd be called, what it'd look like, or even if it wasn't just a hoax entirely. It may be free publicity, but I don't think Nintendo would play games with a risky shortage when the PSP is going to be ten days on their heels. The PS2 beat the Xbox and the Gamecube by a wide enough margin that they could make up for the shortage rush in time to still have breathing room before the Gamecube hit. Nitendo doesn't have that luxery.
Slashdot Mirror
They said it "might" be visible if you have a "decent" telescope. Is it their fault that nobody's invented a decent telescope yet?
Actually, you don't. I've had my population completely wiped out, and been in debt, and it doesn't end. You don't have to quit playing then, it's just kind of boring when you have no income and not enough money to even lay a power line down.
They never billed it as realistic. In fact, they didn't even bill it as a game, but as a toy, mainly because there is no winning or losing, just playing.
There are simulations that a real city planner can use to learn about city planning. Just like there are extremely realistic flight, driving, and even spaceflight simulators. The reason they very rarely try to package up those simulations and sell them as games is that they're not very fun. You have to know how to fly the plane to ever get it off the ground, you have to actually know how to plan a city, or else you won't last very long.
If an urban planner needs a training simulation, I wouldn't think that one that makes more llama jokes than anything else should be very high on his list.
Ouch. That's worse than watching your friend watch his sim watch TV.
H2 didn't kill people in the Hindinburg. Neither did fire, in fact. The hydrogen burned extremely fast and rose very rapidly upwards, away from the passengers. Most of the passengers were crushed to death under the collapsing structure of the airship, rather than burned to death in the fire.
From what they were saying about "XBox TV" a few weeks back, combined with these RSS feeds and integrated into the Xbox Live system, it could very well amount to the equivalent of the amateur leagues in sports at the very least. If it were segregated in some level by region, it would be even moreso. For example, in the amateur sports leagues, there are often a lot more players than the big leagues, but tend to have a few stand-outs overall, and many local areas will have a few outstanding players or teams. They aren't as well known as the star quarterback for the nearest big league football team, and would probably never be recognized on the street outside their home town, but they get enough recognition that if they walk into a local sports bar, they can nab drinks on the house.
A system like that could be automated to a limited extent. People could look at the best players' games, or they could limit it to games with players in their area.
Televised stuff would probably stay limited to the best professional competitive players in a semi-organized league, I think. Things like the top quarter of the players in one of the bit conventions maybe (Like with any tournament, the lower you go in the rankings, the more sheer airtime it takes to broadcast, so you usually have to cut it off fairly high, and do a highlight reel of the lower levels of the tournament to show how far the remaining players have come).
The main problem with coupling just stuff off Xbox Live with TV broadcast is that a lot of people on Xbox live aren't good players (and a lot more are just idiots), so you have a very low ratio of games worth televising to those that aren't, and a hard time to sift through to find the good games and still be fair and not overrepresent a few players who play either very well or just very much.
One way or the other, unless the population in general can find a way to be inspired by gamers or driven to some level of team loyalty (the way people in Detroit get angry any time you point out how badly the Lions and Tigers have been doing the last decade or so), it'll be limited to gamers gaining recognition among other gamers. Not a bad thing at all, and I'd like it a lot, but its still a closed community in that case, and there's no real gain in overall recognition or legitamacy as a sport.
Same thing applies on TechTV: The bulk of its viewers are gamers already, and I seriously doubt anybody who doesn't like video games watches it. People who do well enough to make it on the air will gain some recognition as gamers, but it won't be the sort of, "Hey, check it out, it's the Saginaw County Quake Champion at table six!" sort of recognition that can come from even amateur sports. MTV might be one channel that would buy into broadcasting games. They've usually been willing to try new things to try to appeal to adolescent audeinces. It's a step up, but again, you're broadcasting to an audience that probably largely accepts games already. Then is the fact that it's MTV. I remember a somewhat hostile response to MTV's video game awards by some gamers.
I think to gain widespread recognition and acceptance on par with other sports, it'd have to make it onto more mainstream media that nongamers, and particularly nongamers outside the typical gamer age range watch. ESPN and other sports networks already carries some little league and minor league sports, as well as less recognized sports like paintball, poker, fishing, and so on. Hell, I saw a four hour caber toss tournament on ESPN once, so they're not afraid of investing considerable airtime into unusual things (Unusual to a mostly US audience, anyway)
Not saying it can't be done, though. If log rolling, burger eating, and sharpshooting can make it to ESPN, I see no reason why Quake or WarCraft can't also. It'll really just take a network exec willing to risk a couple hours a week and a few advertising slots in prime time to try it out.
How if Farscape not funny? Between Rygel constantly commenting on how he'd take good care of everybody's stuff when they died and D'argo and John's constant Odd Couple style bickering (not to mention Scorpius and his S&M suit), it was funnier than any of the bland humor in SG1. I laughed my ass off three times when John and Aeryn were arguing. Aeryn called John a Dranit, and he asked, "What the hell's a Dranit?" "You really don't know what a Dranit is?" when she refused to explain the insult, he said "Fine, screw the Dranit!" She laughed at him and said, "You REALLY don't know what a Dranit is." Unfortunately, the show was cancelled before anybody offered a satisfactory explanation of exactly what a Dranit is. Most of "t3h funneh" on SG1 is too forced. They constantly detour away from the plot just to make a joke that doesn't fit with the flow, and isn't really that funny. Most of it doesn't fit the context, either.
Some more reassuring words: Black holes don't last forever either. Even if the entire universe is eventually collected into them, they still "give off" Hawking radiation when they caputure half of a virtual particle pair, but not the other. Even though the escaping particle did not actually come from the black hole, it can be shown that its energy did. Even though the black hole captured a particle, it actually lost mass equivalent to that partcile. Granted we're talking about timespawns on the order of 10^freakishly-large-number, and even then, a gigantic black hole might be a lot more interesting than a lot of weakly interacting particles.
Excessively low, I should think. Only 1300 solar masses. Even a tiny dwarf galaxy would be millions of solar masses. Also, they tend to get torn apart rather than crushed in the process of being "swallowed."
What the other poster said. But even if things where like you said, this is a 1600 solar mass black hole orbiting a 2.6 million solar mass black hole at a distance of 3 light years. At galactic distances, they can be approximated as a single 2.6016 million solar mass object. It's just not big enough to matter in that respect.
Incriminating how? I don't buy that its real either, but this is the sort of stuff this guy says when he talks. He's not exactly the sharpest bulb on the tree.
I used a simmilar metaphor (using IE without a firewall is like having unprotected group sex blindfolded was the one I used). One person I told this two actually STOPPED using Mozilla, though, so I tend to stay away from the sex metaphors now.
Probably not. Jennings has made it as far as he has because he knows a little bit about seemingly everything, whereas Peek effectively knows everything about a narrow set of fifteen subjects. Jeopardy covers a wide set of subjects in each game (sixteen categories per show, usually one or two of which is a sort of grab bag where all the answers have an O in them or something, but cover completely unrelated topics), with relatively little repeat subjects from show to show. Somebody with a lot of knowledge about a few subjects can win one or two shows if the topics go their way, but they'll lose in the long run because the topics change dramatically.
You can get that in the US too. Not sure if the coverage is as good as in Australia, though. And you also have to worry about insurance companies poking around taking pictures through your windows. They'll do anything to catch you moving furniture, rotating your matress, or carrying heavy cases of beer into all the parties your employer assumes you're having with all your free money/time. Again, not sure if they do this in Australia or not.
It'll beat the N-Gage, but that isn't saying much. If the PSP does even worse than I expect, it might have a distant shot at pulling #2 in the US market like the Xbox did. But, I think the PSP will do at least Game Gear decent, leaving this thing (hell, I can't even remember its name already) high and dry.
I've never seen a giant check with an account number on it. Mine just had 000 00000 000, which is the same thing they put on the sample checks they give you at the bank.
I'd say things are a bit closer to what the article says than you think, but you're on the right track - google gives in to almost any pressure in a heartbeat. Google's always been perfectly willing to throw up the "This search has items removed which may be in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act" things in results. I've been getting them more and more often on various things. If you get creative with your search terms, you can come up with a lot of different messages about why some results were omitted from a search. I've never seen any of that on other search engines.
I got one of those giant checks for about $10 once from a sweepsakes that I might have won $100,000 in, but didn't really read all the fine print so I'm not sure exactly. The giant check isn't the real check - they don't have any of the markings on the back, and they even say, "NON NEGOTIABLE" in non-giant print at the bottom. You get to keep that one, and buy a giant picture frame in and hang it on the wall or something. They give you a real, normal-size check to cash.
You happen to live in Saginaw? There were a lot of people being turned away because the pollers claimed they weren't on the list. There were unhappy crowds at a couple sites well after midnight, and the police ended up escorting a lot of people into polling sites and checking the lists themselves. Of course, nearly all the people turned away were on the lists. Several presincts were telling people they were supposed to vote at other locations when they weren't, and refusing to allow them to vote. As a side-note, in an attempt to add injury to insult, the pro-life people were putting bumper stickers on people's windshields, and I was late for work trying to scrape them off so I could see (They put them at head-level, centered over the steering wheel, so I couldn't drive without getting them off).
A lot of the humor is accidental, usually caused by bad translation and localization. Things like Arngrim thanking the king from the bottom of his feet, wizards attacking spoony bards, and somebody setting up us the bomb.
They won't just lose Xbox stuff. So I can't buy my Xbox games there, I'll go accross the street to Walmart, or down half a mile to Target (all three are on the same damn block of Titabawasee in Saginaw). While I'm there, I might as well get my other games there. And I'm out of beer, so I'll get that. Hell, as long as the cart's half full, I'll get my groceries while I'm here. Oh, that's a cool shirt, I'll buy that. Before long, I have the Target shopper's card and stop carrying my Meijer discount card because I don't need it anymore. If I went to Meijer, it would just mean an extra hop over someplace else to look for Xbox games.
You're not missing much anymore. The ones in Saginaw, Midland, and Flint have gone to hell the last couple years. The Saginaw Tittabawassee location started some renovations a few years ago, and half the store's been lit with utility lights ever since. The same one was losing lots of money because people were stealing flowers from the garden department (which is set up so you can go outside from it without passing the checkout lanes). So they moved it to the back of the store, and put the drug isle in its place. Guess how much they're losing now when you can walk from isle with some of the most expensive and often stolen items in the store outside without passing the checkout lanes?
Wait until its out to see what PA has to say. They rip on everything that isn't out yet. Look at how they went after the Xbox, but after it came out, they didn't say anything about it except a couple comments on the old controllers.
I agree. The DS has, compared to the PS2 and its shortages, come out of nowhere. Just a few months ago, we didn't know what it'd be called, what it'd look like, or even if it wasn't just a hoax entirely. It may be free publicity, but I don't think Nintendo would play games with a risky shortage when the PSP is going to be ten days on their heels. The PS2 beat the Xbox and the Gamecube by a wide enough margin that they could make up for the shortage rush in time to still have breathing room before the Gamecube hit. Nitendo doesn't have that luxery.
Any news on how PSP preorders are going?