I live in Michigan. Half the traffic accross the bridges around Detroit is people going into Canada to get health care because it costs $75,000 to get an angioplasty at Covenant Healthcare. The waiting lines aren't all that long. Hell, and ambulance took me over the border when I broke a leg in Cobo hall a few years ago because all the hospitals around Detroit were turning patients away.
I give is twenty-five more years before people shut up about video games entirely.
In the 17-1800's, they said that the novel was destroying the intellectual youth, and that you could never properly appreciate a story in writing. You had to actually go and see it played out to properly understand its import.
Then, the movie comes along, and they say that that is destroying our intellectual youth, because you can't properly appreciate a story by watching it played out. You have to read it in full prose to fully comprehend it.
I wonder what they'll go after when they've exausted the fight over video games?
Most of these researches are funded for weapons production, which values maximum destruction.
It should be pointed out that the maximum destruction paradigm of war has passed. Thirty years ago, you couldn't get a nickle if your bomb wasn't at least 80 megatons, but look at most of the current arsenals. The largest weapons used are 20,000 pounds - ten tons. And the most heaviliy used weapons are ones that have a remarkably small yeild, and normally don't destroy entire buildings. Even during the Cold War, the arsenals actually used in Vietnam and other conflicts weren't much different than our current arsenals, minus the fancy guidance and targeting electronics.
You can argue pretty well that this isn't a humanitarian effort, but a capitalist one. After all, if you deploy maximum destruction too exensively, there's nothing left afterwards.
Most countries learned their lesson after World War II. We did such a number on Germany at the end of the war that there was hardly anything left worth occupying - and indeed, if it weren't for the US and the USSR both expecting the other to occupy the rest of the country the second either one flinched, there probably wouldn't have been foreign armies stationed there for decades.
They didn't claim to have made what you say they did.
They say that they made a small amount of matter in one of its earliest forms following the big bang.
What can it tell them about the big bang? Well, we have this knolwege gap from about 10^-65 to 10^0 seconds as to what exactly was going on with subatomic particles. They it in with speculation, but they've never had any impirical clue how any of these exotic kinds of plasma and neutrinos they had populating the early universe would actually behave. If we did this experiment, and found out that this plasma was freakishly unstable and tended to decay into low-energy photons, then that would be a monkey wrench in our theories, eh?
That's the point of most theoretical experiments: If the experiment goes as was predicted, you really don't learn anything because you had a pretty good idea that's how it was to begin with. Its when things go horribly wrong (the mouse climbs over the top of the maze and makes a beeline for the cheese, or the guinea pig rolls over and dies from a carrot after swallowing 750 mg of cocaine a day for six months) that science really starts to learn things.
Of course, failure doesn't get funding, and they have to babble on about a lot of stuff we all knew already in order to fund the really interesting blunders they don't talk about.
Hell, for that matter, most colleges do the experiment in Chem 100.
Here's what you do: Get a thin-walled container (a baloon works well), and put 2 liters of hydrogen (H2) and 1 liter of oxygen (O2) in it, rupture it, and set off a spark.
You'll end up producing a puff of water vapor which will dissipate very quickly (You can't drown somebody with this unless you have millions of gallons or something). What does damage with a bomb like this is the shock wave.
When you light off that 3 liter baloon, the sound is considerably louder than a gunshot. Some people in my chem class claimed it was even painful through their rifle-range earmuffs, and it was certainly audible through them. You set up a large bomb using the same principle, and it can collapse buildings or bunkers as well as an incendiary bomb, and much cheaper.
They did test it, but they never used it because inmost countries with advanced militaries, defence industries are major lobies. One of these water bombs can do, for a few thousand dollars (allowing for the $25 screws!) what most governments pay tens or hundreds of thusands, even millions, to accomplish with conventional bombs.
If there were any force in the universe that would cause our entire atmosphere to ignite, freeze, liquify, or turn into an army of naked women, it would have run into us at some time during the last billion years anyway, and we wouldn't be here to worry about it.
Well, then, even more to the point being made that it's so small. A microscopic speck of anything that isn't going to infect my central nervous system or try to pass from my kidneys to my bladder the hard way isn't anything I'm going to worry about.
If that's true, it's hilarious. They made the lenses out of diamond, and used all sorts of high-temperature materials like tungsten to keep the thing from melting, and then they put a plastic lensecap on it and can't take any pictures.
Why the Xbox? Less equipment to haul around for troops in the field, less potential issues to fix, cheaper.
PC's are bigger than Xbox's. Big as an Xbox is, a PC still has more stuff to lug around, which is more of an issue for the troops than their families back home - remember, they'll have to pack the Xbox's up to bring back with the troops, or to relocate to another area of operation with the troops.
Also, with the Xbox, you know everybody can run the games, you know they'll be compatible with the online servers, and you don't have to worry about, for example, me having patch 1.11 and you having 1.12 and the game either not working or getting out-of-sync.
Lastly, a good gaming PC can cost $500 up to a copule grand. An Xbox is still pretty cheap. For an individual user, it comes down to a preference thing. But we'll say that for 100,000 troops, they have 1,000 systems. A $500 PC means they spend $500,000. A $200 Xbox means they spend $200,000. That's a $300,000 gap in the budget in a time when it's already stretched pretty thin.
Dransik went into open beta for the first time in late 2000. It went back and forth between open and "closed beta" (closed beta=no new accounts allowed, only existing accounts. Open beta=free signup), and then went non-beta for a while in 2002. In late 2002, it went back to open beta with a new engine and some massive overhauling, which went to "pay-to-play beta" due to the developers going bankrupt last August. Then, TKO software bought Asylumsoft, and now it's back in open beta with a new name (Ashen Empires)...
The problem with MMORPGs is that they never get out of the classical definition of "beta." They're never quite "done." New problems come up as user levels exceed the design limits of the system and long-term accumulation of items or gold by players unbalances the game economy in unforseen ways and requires changes to the system. New content is added regularly to give people new things to look for and do. This sort of state would be called "beta" in any other kind of game, since they develop them, release them, patch any remaining bugs, then stop developing for it. But with MMORPGs, it's just the way things work.
They've really only recreated a *possible* representation of the material makeup of the very early universe. The potential for learning about the Big Bang is pretty impressive from this, but it's really only a surface feature of the universe's beginning.
The Big Bang wasn't just a bunch of material blasting outwards into space. It was space itself expanding out of what was, effectively, nothing (The laws of physics break in a singularity, which was what the universe was to begin with. Science can't say anything about it, since there's no proximate way to study or model it).
Also, this plasma is still a form of matter, however torn-apart it is. The first picoseconds of the big bang were nothing but intense energy. Plasma formed after a short time, and eventually associated into "large" structures like protons and such. We're making this plasma.
To think this is making a short-lived universe would be like thinking that making a bunch of smoke and throwing debris around would be making an explosion. It's not the Big Bang we're creating, but its product.
Since when does Gabe ever make top-posts in the news? Except for the time Tycho was on vacation, this is the only time. I just see the top news post, and I figure, "Oh, Tycho wrote this."
I feel like posting to his new article, but I really can't be gracious about his apology. I'd like to be, and I'm pretty sure he learned a hard lesson when he's seen so many gamers spending hundreds of dollars for kids they've never met, in a year when Toys for Tots and Coats for Kids barely register.
But then, his apology carries too little credibility. He could have retracted his previous statements that gamers were warped and the most dangerous animals, and I'd probably take his word for it. But he has to claim he never said what he said, which pisses me off much more than the fact that he said it to begin with.
See, words have meanings. When you put the words, "Gamers," "are," "bad," and, "people," together in that order, people generally assume you mean, "Gamers are bad people," and not, "Ducks have orange cocks."
The way I read this, not only has he said gamers are sick twisted child rapers, but now he seems to think we're either illeterate or have no memory span.
Hate to tell him, I can read, and I have a hard time forgetting.
From the way the article talks, they put something like a digital watermark on each screener copy they sent out. Each copy had a different watermark, so they could tell if it had been sent to Billy, Joe, or Bob by checking the watermarks.
Yet another reason for me to personally believe that the system is very much more in its infancy than they want us to think.
They also show screenshots of games who's developers have explicitly said they were not developing for the Phantom ("at this time"), and touted it being able to do much more than it ever will be equipped for. I can remember how much they said the X-box could be expected to do, and it doesn't do half of it. Cable systems are supposed to be proprietary, so if they stick the modem inside the box, either it'll only work on, say, Charter Pipeline, or they'll have a lot of work partering with lots of different companies.
What I think they have right now is the user-end of the system: A PC in a modded case with a nice front-end to launch games from. Any download system that reviewers have seen is probably jerry-rigged at best, or the phantom hooked right up to the server, not traversing the internet like the production model claims it will.
I've upgraded myself from thinking it's a hoax to thinking it's an investor ripoff. They're sucking up investor money, and gamers are becomming increasingly skeptical of it. It'll be remembered as the N-Gage of of the set-top-box, most likely.
Those funky butterfly-head screws on the Sega Megadrive didn't keep me out. Glue sure as heck won't. I bet ten bucks this thing gets modded faster than it gets bought.
Take a look at the games on the list, though. Risk, Monopoly, Pong, Alien Invaders. Not many of these games stand to take more than a few megabytes. Heck, I had Hasbro's Risk II on my old 286, and I had to set the cpu to the 6mhz speed or the sound glitched.
You definitely got a lemmon. Mine's worked for months, and the one before that worked for years until it got caught in the metal rails on my desk drawer - THEN you have big blobs of ink all over the place.
It must be a different thing. This Phantom is being made by a company that's only been in existence since sometime in late 2002/early 2003. The people who started Infinium were busy with other scams like MCI WorldCom in the 90's.
I emailed blizzard, like I said, some time ago about the Phantom. Infinium has used screenshots of Starcraft: Ghost in a few of their previews, and strongly implied it would be available for their system, but it isn't on their list.
I'm even more hesitant to trust them after a few things like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Either that, or get together enough gamers to be considered a minority interest and then sue them for the same thing.
I live in Michigan. Half the traffic accross the bridges around Detroit is people going into Canada to get health care because it costs $75,000 to get an angioplasty at Covenant Healthcare. The waiting lines aren't all that long. Hell, and ambulance took me over the border when I broke a leg in Cobo hall a few years ago because all the hospitals around Detroit were turning patients away.
I give is twenty-five more years before people shut up about video games entirely.
In the 17-1800's, they said that the novel was destroying the intellectual youth, and that you could never properly appreciate a story in writing. You had to actually go and see it played out to properly understand its import.
Then, the movie comes along, and they say that that is destroying our intellectual youth, because you can't properly appreciate a story by watching it played out. You have to read it in full prose to fully comprehend it.
I wonder what they'll go after when they've exausted the fight over video games?
Most of these researches are funded for weapons production, which values maximum destruction.
It should be pointed out that the maximum destruction paradigm of war has passed. Thirty years ago, you couldn't get a nickle if your bomb wasn't at least 80 megatons, but look at most of the current arsenals. The largest weapons used are 20,000 pounds - ten tons. And the most heaviliy used weapons are ones that have a remarkably small yeild, and normally don't destroy entire buildings. Even during the Cold War, the arsenals actually used in Vietnam and other conflicts weren't much different than our current arsenals, minus the fancy guidance and targeting electronics.
You can argue pretty well that this isn't a humanitarian effort, but a capitalist one. After all, if you deploy maximum destruction too exensively, there's nothing left afterwards.
Most countries learned their lesson after World War II. We did such a number on Germany at the end of the war that there was hardly anything left worth occupying - and indeed, if it weren't for the US and the USSR both expecting the other to occupy the rest of the country the second either one flinched, there probably wouldn't have been foreign armies stationed there for decades.
Arent they bot names from Quake 3?? He DID answer in the form of a question.
They didn't claim to have made what you say they did.
They say that they made a small amount of matter in one of its earliest forms following the big bang.
What can it tell them about the big bang? Well, we have this knolwege gap from about 10^-65 to 10^0 seconds as to what exactly was going on with subatomic particles. They it in with speculation, but they've never had any impirical clue how any of these exotic kinds of plasma and neutrinos they had populating the early universe would actually behave. If we did this experiment, and found out that this plasma was freakishly unstable and tended to decay into low-energy photons, then that would be a monkey wrench in our theories, eh?
That's the point of most theoretical experiments: If the experiment goes as was predicted, you really don't learn anything because you had a pretty good idea that's how it was to begin with. Its when things go horribly wrong (the mouse climbs over the top of the maze and makes a beeline for the cheese, or the guinea pig rolls over and dies from a carrot after swallowing 750 mg of cocaine a day for six months) that science really starts to learn things.
Of course, failure doesn't get funding, and they have to babble on about a lot of stuff we all knew already in order to fund the really interesting blunders they don't talk about.
This may be out in left field, but I'm thinking some revolutinary new form of Silly-Putty.
Sorta-kinda-maybe. It actually was tested.
Hell, for that matter, most colleges do the experiment in Chem 100.
Here's what you do: Get a thin-walled container (a baloon works well), and put 2 liters of hydrogen (H2) and 1 liter of oxygen (O2) in it, rupture it, and set off a spark.
You'll end up producing a puff of water vapor which will dissipate very quickly (You can't drown somebody with this unless you have millions of gallons or something). What does damage with a bomb like this is the shock wave.
When you light off that 3 liter baloon, the sound is considerably louder than a gunshot. Some people in my chem class claimed it was even painful through their rifle-range earmuffs, and it was certainly audible through them. You set up a large bomb using the same principle, and it can collapse buildings or bunkers as well as an incendiary bomb, and much cheaper.
They did test it, but they never used it because inmost countries with advanced militaries, defence industries are major lobies. One of these water bombs can do, for a few thousand dollars (allowing for the $25 screws!) what most governments pay tens or hundreds of thusands, even millions, to accomplish with conventional bombs.
If there were any force in the universe that would cause our entire atmosphere to ignite, freeze, liquify, or turn into an army of naked women, it would have run into us at some time during the last billion years anyway, and we wouldn't be here to worry about it.
Well, then, even more to the point being made that it's so small. A microscopic speck of anything that isn't going to infect my central nervous system or try to pass from my kidneys to my bladder the hard way isn't anything I'm going to worry about.
If that's true, it's hilarious. They made the lenses out of diamond, and used all sorts of high-temperature materials like tungsten to keep the thing from melting, and then they put a plastic lensecap on it and can't take any pictures.
Why the Xbox? Less equipment to haul around for troops in the field, less potential issues to fix, cheaper. PC's are bigger than Xbox's. Big as an Xbox is, a PC still has more stuff to lug around, which is more of an issue for the troops than their families back home - remember, they'll have to pack the Xbox's up to bring back with the troops, or to relocate to another area of operation with the troops. Also, with the Xbox, you know everybody can run the games, you know they'll be compatible with the online servers, and you don't have to worry about, for example, me having patch 1.11 and you having 1.12 and the game either not working or getting out-of-sync. Lastly, a good gaming PC can cost $500 up to a copule grand. An Xbox is still pretty cheap. For an individual user, it comes down to a preference thing. But we'll say that for 100,000 troops, they have 1,000 systems. A $500 PC means they spend $500,000. A $200 Xbox means they spend $200,000. That's a $300,000 gap in the budget in a time when it's already stretched pretty thin.
Dransik went into open beta for the first time in late 2000. It went back and forth between open and "closed beta" (closed beta=no new accounts allowed, only existing accounts. Open beta=free signup), and then went non-beta for a while in 2002. In late 2002, it went back to open beta with a new engine and some massive overhauling, which went to "pay-to-play beta" due to the developers going bankrupt last August. Then, TKO software bought Asylumsoft, and now it's back in open beta with a new name (Ashen Empires)...
The problem with MMORPGs is that they never get out of the classical definition of "beta." They're never quite "done." New problems come up as user levels exceed the design limits of the system and long-term accumulation of items or gold by players unbalances the game economy in unforseen ways and requires changes to the system. New content is added regularly to give people new things to look for and do. This sort of state would be called "beta" in any other kind of game, since they develop them, release them, patch any remaining bugs, then stop developing for it. But with MMORPGs, it's just the way things work.
They've really only recreated a *possible* representation of the material makeup of the very early universe. The potential for learning about the Big Bang is pretty impressive from this, but it's really only a surface feature of the universe's beginning.
The Big Bang wasn't just a bunch of material blasting outwards into space. It was space itself expanding out of what was, effectively, nothing (The laws of physics break in a singularity, which was what the universe was to begin with. Science can't say anything about it, since there's no proximate way to study or model it).
Also, this plasma is still a form of matter, however torn-apart it is. The first picoseconds of the big bang were nothing but intense energy. Plasma formed after a short time, and eventually associated into "large" structures like protons and such. We're making this plasma.
To think this is making a short-lived universe would be like thinking that making a bunch of smoke and throwing debris around would be making an explosion. It's not the Big Bang we're creating, but its product.
Since when does Gabe ever make top-posts in the news? Except for the time Tycho was on vacation, this is the only time. I just see the top news post, and I figure, "Oh, Tycho wrote this."
I feel like posting to his new article, but I really can't be gracious about his apology. I'd like to be, and I'm pretty sure he learned a hard lesson when he's seen so many gamers spending hundreds of dollars for kids they've never met, in a year when Toys for Tots and Coats for Kids barely register.
But then, his apology carries too little credibility. He could have retracted his previous statements that gamers were warped and the most dangerous animals, and I'd probably take his word for it. But he has to claim he never said what he said, which pisses me off much more than the fact that he said it to begin with.
See, words have meanings. When you put the words, "Gamers," "are," "bad," and, "people," together in that order, people generally assume you mean, "Gamers are bad people," and not, "Ducks have orange cocks."
The way I read this, not only has he said gamers are sick twisted child rapers, but now he seems to think we're either illeterate or have no memory span.
Hate to tell him, I can read, and I have a hard time forgetting.
Tycho made the comment.
From the way the article talks, they put something like a digital watermark on each screener copy they sent out. Each copy had a different watermark, so they could tell if it had been sent to Billy, Joe, or Bob by checking the watermarks.
Yet another reason for me to personally believe that the system is very much more in its infancy than they want us to think.
They also show screenshots of games who's developers have explicitly said they were not developing for the Phantom ("at this time"), and touted it being able to do much more than it ever will be equipped for. I can remember how much they said the X-box could be expected to do, and it doesn't do half of it. Cable systems are supposed to be proprietary, so if they stick the modem inside the box, either it'll only work on, say, Charter Pipeline, or they'll have a lot of work partering with lots of different companies.
What I think they have right now is the user-end of the system: A PC in a modded case with a nice front-end to launch games from. Any download system that reviewers have seen is probably jerry-rigged at best, or the phantom hooked right up to the server, not traversing the internet like the production model claims it will.
I've upgraded myself from thinking it's a hoax to thinking it's an investor ripoff. They're sucking up investor money, and gamers are becomming increasingly skeptical of it. It'll be remembered as the N-Gage of of the set-top-box, most likely.
'tamper proof' and glued shut
Those funky butterfly-head screws on the Sega Megadrive didn't keep me out. Glue sure as heck won't. I bet ten bucks this thing gets modded faster than it gets bought.
Take a look at the games on the list, though. Risk, Monopoly, Pong, Alien Invaders. Not many of these games stand to take more than a few megabytes. Heck, I had Hasbro's Risk II on my old 286, and I had to set the cpu to the 6mhz speed or the sound glitched.
You definitely got a lemmon. Mine's worked for months, and the one before that worked for years until it got caught in the metal rails on my desk drawer - THEN you have big blobs of ink all over the place.
I thought that too. It'd be more appropriate, too. I mean, it's hardly a GReek tragedy - nobody dies, no kindoms fall, nobody marries their mother.
Also will look much like the movie (with adult stuff) menus from said hotels.
Maybe those weird porno games that are so popular in Japan will finally find a market niche in the US.
It must be a different thing. This Phantom is being made by a company that's only been in existence since sometime in late 2002/early 2003. The people who started Infinium were busy with other scams like MCI WorldCom in the 90's.
I emailed blizzard, like I said, some time ago about the Phantom. Infinium has used screenshots of Starcraft: Ghost in a few of their previews, and strongly implied it would be available for their system, but it isn't on their list.
I'm even more hesitant to trust them after a few things like that.