I imagine their plans are a bit more detailed than the sumbitter makes it sound. Certainly sharing resources has been planned for in a "minor" issue (something that would prevent reentry and/or landing, but not operation in space), but they have to plan for a worse case scenario where the shuttle can no longer be trusted to safeguard the people on board.
If we both go into the woods, and our plan is to meet up if something happens to one of us, it's great if we plan to share food and water in that case until our third friend can bring the truck out to get us, but then what happens if my pack is damaged and inedible, or even lost? If we didn't plan for that, and you don't have enough food for both of us, we're in serious trouble.
Of course, there's a worse scenario in which neither the shuttle nor the station can be trusted to keep their crews alive. That's one of those things that can't be feasibly handled with what we have up there now, I think, so... it's something to remember, but we just have to cross our fingers and hope it doesn't happen until we're prepared for it (if we ever will be).
Yeah, overload for me. Most of the big names in FPSs hit last year. Doom, Halo, Half Life, and a few other really good games. Will Quake 4 be at E3? There are a few nice games on the way, but after last year, it'll be slow for the genre for a while.
Last year was so big for first person shooters that there's almost no way the genre can match it. It's like playing all of Beehtoven's 7th symphony and then following it with a violin solo. A solo violinist can do amazing things, but they'll still be overshadowed no matter how good they are.
Sony still has the name advantage. They've had two wildly successful consoles, and they're currently making a respectable bid in the handheld market. It's certainly not shapping up into the PS2 vs. Dreamcast scenario some people expected, but Nintendo's stranglehold of the handheld market is nigh on over.
Microsoft has had some success so far. They've done well in the US, but no Japan. I haven't kept up on the numbers in Europe. If they want to move that many units, though, they're going to need a very good showing in Japan, which means they'll need a lineup of Japanese games for the launch. The Xbox basically has a Shin Meganami Tensei game, which was just a port from the PS2 anyway.
Japanese games are quite a bit different than American games. If you've played enough of both, you can usually tell within about three minutes tops seeing a new game wether it was made in north america/europe or in Japan, and that's just counting the ones that are imported to the US. There are a lot of very popular games in Japan that I can't even make sense of or understand, but they're popular. That's the kind of games that Microsoft needs to get anywhere in Japan.
No games, no console. Simple.
I hope not. I've always had bad luck with wireless controllers. They're great and all, but all it takes is a glitch in the signal for a split second while a boss is about to bring a huge hammer down on my head, and it'll suffer one of those unfortunate warranty-ending accidents.
There's a little catch you would have learned in any standard civics or government book.
If a law is passed which conflicts with a previous law, the previous law is repealed simply by the passage of the new law. The DMCA damages fair use and so forth, and, like it or not, those laws were nullified to the extent that the DMCA overruled them.
For example, let's say we pass a law saying that the use and posession of marijuana is legal. Previous laws regarding marijuana are nullified. We don't have to go back and say that such-and-such sections of such-and-such bills are repealed, it just is by virtue of the newer bill.
I agree. If the information is that sensitive, I would think it's worth the safety to just screw the warranty and physically destroy the drive. Every other solution I've heard of carries the risk of the data being recoverable, or just ends up taking time (rewriting the entire drive repeatedly, for example). Open the housing and smash the platter. You can even throw away the fragments spread over several collection days if you want to make it especially hard to recover data, but I doubt it matters at that point.
1. Yep. 2. Not really. You don't need the players' or teams' names to make a football game. I remember some of the old ones calling their teams just "Denver" and "Chicago," with modified logos and player names spelled differently than the real ones. Even a randomly generated roster would work - and could work BETTER, for replay value. Even then, can one type of game make a monopoly? Saying that would lead us to say that Sega has a monopoly on games like Sonic, or that Bioware has a monopoly on Star Wars RPGs. Even taking into account all the other games that EA makes, they're still not a monopoly. Big, yes. Biggest, certainly. But they're still not even a majority of the video game industry, let alone a monopoly. 3. For the same reason nobody's done anything about Microsoft. When the gorrilla wants the best seat in the monkey house, the capuchins aren't going to pursuade him to move. 3a. Great and fine, but you'll never get enough people behind it. Try, though, even an unheard and unnoticed protest is a protest just the same. 4. As a consumer, you also have the right to influence other consumers. By telling them WHY EA is a bad company, you hope to also get them to excercise their rights as consumers. 5. And if somebody made a football game with mutants now, it wouldn't be innovation. NFL Blitz was innovation, but now if another game goes that route, it won't be innovative either. Where does it go from here? Invent a new, simmilar game? Is it still football at that point? 6. I don't remember them being good before 92 either.
It could happen in any place, but the point is, it's very unlikely to happen to them all.
Take, for example, this scenario: Man lives on earth, has space stations scattered around, and colonies on the moon and Mars.
Now, an asteroid hits Earth, there's a nuclear war, eruption of a super-volcano like Yellowstone, and human life on Earth is either extinguished, put in grave peril, or just made all-around miserable. Mankind still survives as a whole in space and elsewhere.
The odds of any one catastrphe befalling Earth is low. The odds of it befalling one of our off-planet colonies is the same, if not lower - No atmosphere on the moon, so not much chance of lunar warming. No groundwater to contaminate, no biosphere to disrupt. Far less people and probably better control, meaning less risk of war.
However, the chance of it hitting all of them at once is so low as to be zero (with the possible exception of war. Nations on Earth may attack colonies of other nations in space, citizens of different countries on earth may become polarized in the same disputes off-planet, etc). If majot catastrphy suddenly hits Earth, all our space stations, the Moon, Mars, and some shuttle traveling in between at once, then somebody probably has it out for us anyway and we're screwed either way.
Because product placement has meant more creative and ambitions movies?
Maybe you didn't see the preview that got posted yesterday for the Hitch Hiker's Guide movie? "Ford, this is terrible. We're getting thrown out of an alien spacecraft and I can't get a connection on my Nokia phone!"
The point is, product placements have never improved anything. Companies throw together crappy movies and turn them into one big advertisement. What was The Italian Job if not a mini cooper advertisement?
I've been playing under AO's free plan, and have barely noticed the billboards. There have been billboards up for as long as I've played the game, but before the advertised popular cars, guns, and tourist attractions in-game, they're just replaced now.
Not 2:1 in totals, but in weekly sales, it was until the last week of March.
Those numbers are sales in Japan as of the end of March. The PSP has 623k sold this year, DS has 485k. In the last week of March, the DS had 55k and the PSP had 43k, but the week before, the DS only had 22k. I saw numbers from before that that were pretty much the same.
The jump was because the new colors came out that week. I'm not sure if it's managed to hang onto those numbers or not. The site they link to as their source doesn't seem to have detailed hardware sales up right now, but they do have % shares of total hardware sales. The DS is at 30%, the PSP is only 24%, so it looks like they have at least partially.
There's a major difference, though. First off, there are virtually no female murderers before the industrial revolution, and it goes down the farther back you go. Also, of those that there have been, the vast majority are murderers that people can sympathise with. They had a reason to kill, even if it may not justify killing, it was certainly a good reason to be very angry. Men, on the other hand, who have nothing going against them in life have been known to kill people over a pair of shoes.
It's not layered, though, as I understand it. Somebody had some good links (and a cheap diagram) above. The "3D" part comes in that the magnetic axis is perpendicular to the drive platter, not parrallel. Think of it like taking 500 bar magnets and first setting them end-to-end, and then standing them up on end and setting them that way. They take up less room, so you can fit more of them on the same area. There's no stacking or layering involved.
Microsoft did not impose those sentences. RTFA. A judge did. The "fine" was not a fine, it was restitution he was ordered to pay Microsoft. Microsoft has the right to suggest that the judge replace the damages with a community service sentence.
Windows are a neccessary element of a house, but INSECURE windows are not.
They make windows that can survive getting a rock or brick thrown at them with minimal visual distortion.
Even if you don't do that, all home security systems have dirt cheap break sensors that go on all windows. Ours came standard with ten of them, and additional ones were a whole $1.50 each. You break a window, and you trigger the alarm, which not only sends in an emergency call, but also makes a lot of noise and attracts unwanted attention from the neighbors.
Computers have nothing to do with it. $800 has been grounds to get the proverbial cap popped in your proverbial ass for years. Wars have been fought over so much.
Verbal contracts are legally binding, but it's harder to prove in court. If XXX says that they lentt YYY to ZZZ, and then ZZZ says that YYY was a gift, then the judge has a hard time sorting out the circumstances of the exchange. If no other evidence comes to light, the judge will side with the defendant (plaintiff must win by preponderance of evidence in civil court).
Then again, that's all US law, not Chinese. Contract law is pretty daunting stuff just if you go from one state to the other in the US, let alone overseas.
Like I posted above, in this case, the guy may not even have equated the vitual property with real property. He lent somebody else the sword, who then sold it for a large sum of money. $800 is a lot of money, and people have been killed over smaller sums.
It'd be nice to know how this would have played out, say, if the sword was lost or looted rather than sold. In that case, the sword is lost, but that's it. The killer may have been angry or annoyed, but I doubt he would have killed for it.
But selling it, there's more at stake than just a digital sword. There's been a violation of trust, you lent somebody something and they betrayed you, and there's also now around $800 USD in the mix.
I have to wonder if this would have happened if the victim lost the sword, rather than selling it for over $1000. It's one thing to borrow something and then break or loose it. It's another to borrow it and then sell it for a personal profit.
Nope. Maybe there's a "zero-day" warranty where if it's shipped broken you have to replace it, but the legal definition of "broken" has a pretty high standard. For example, to get a car replaced under the lemmon laws in Michigan, you need to have it repaired for the same problem three times within one year while under warranty and then have it develop the same problem again.
Mine has one in the top screen and two in the bottom (althouth the ones in the bottom are right along the edge, and they had to be pointed out to me to even see them). My Visor Prism has a dead subpixel, but it's also near the edge. My laptop monitor has about 20 or so, but it's an old (1999) computer and has seen a lot of use.
It happens, it's not usually a big deal, but when I get an LCD that has dead pixels that interfere with use, I will complain.
Slashdot Mirror
I imagine their plans are a bit more detailed than the sumbitter makes it sound. Certainly sharing resources has been planned for in a "minor" issue (something that would prevent reentry and/or landing, but not operation in space), but they have to plan for a worse case scenario where the shuttle can no longer be trusted to safeguard the people on board.
If we both go into the woods, and our plan is to meet up if something happens to one of us, it's great if we plan to share food and water in that case until our third friend can bring the truck out to get us, but then what happens if my pack is damaged and inedible, or even lost? If we didn't plan for that, and you don't have enough food for both of us, we're in serious trouble.
Of course, there's a worse scenario in which neither the shuttle nor the station can be trusted to keep their crews alive. That's one of those things that can't be feasibly handled with what we have up there now, I think, so... it's something to remember, but we just have to cross our fingers and hope it doesn't happen until we're prepared for it (if we ever will be).
More than one "hit" FPS a year is too many IMO
Yeah, overload for me. Most of the big names in FPSs hit last year. Doom, Halo, Half Life, and a few other really good games. Will Quake 4 be at E3? There are a few nice games on the way, but after last year, it'll be slow for the genre for a while.
Last year was so big for first person shooters that there's almost no way the genre can match it. It's like playing all of Beehtoven's 7th symphony and then following it with a violin solo. A solo violinist can do amazing things, but they'll still be overshadowed no matter how good they are.
Sony still has the name advantage. They've had two wildly successful consoles, and they're currently making a respectable bid in the handheld market. It's certainly not shapping up into the PS2 vs. Dreamcast scenario some people expected, but Nintendo's stranglehold of the handheld market is nigh on over. Microsoft has had some success so far. They've done well in the US, but no Japan. I haven't kept up on the numbers in Europe. If they want to move that many units, though, they're going to need a very good showing in Japan, which means they'll need a lineup of Japanese games for the launch. The Xbox basically has a Shin Meganami Tensei game, which was just a port from the PS2 anyway. Japanese games are quite a bit different than American games. If you've played enough of both, you can usually tell within about three minutes tops seeing a new game wether it was made in north america/europe or in Japan, and that's just counting the ones that are imported to the US. There are a lot of very popular games in Japan that I can't even make sense of or understand, but they're popular. That's the kind of games that Microsoft needs to get anywhere in Japan. No games, no console. Simple.
I hope not. I've always had bad luck with wireless controllers. They're great and all, but all it takes is a glitch in the signal for a split second while a boss is about to bring a huge hammer down on my head, and it'll suffer one of those unfortunate warranty-ending accidents.
There's a little catch you would have learned in any standard civics or government book.
If a law is passed which conflicts with a previous law, the previous law is repealed simply by the passage of the new law. The DMCA damages fair use and so forth, and, like it or not, those laws were nullified to the extent that the DMCA overruled them.
For example, let's say we pass a law saying that the use and posession of marijuana is legal. Previous laws regarding marijuana are nullified. We don't have to go back and say that such-and-such sections of such-and-such bills are repealed, it just is by virtue of the newer bill.
I agree. If the information is that sensitive, I would think it's worth the safety to just screw the warranty and physically destroy the drive. Every other solution I've heard of carries the risk of the data being recoverable, or just ends up taking time (rewriting the entire drive repeatedly, for example). Open the housing and smash the platter. You can even throw away the fragments spread over several collection days if you want to make it especially hard to recover data, but I doubt it matters at that point.
It's a mixture. Sort of like with gold jewelry. It's too expensive for many people, so they mix in other metals to reduce the price.
And to get the standard replies out of the way:
1. Yep.
2. Not really. You don't need the players' or teams' names to make a football game. I remember some of the old ones calling their teams just "Denver" and "Chicago," with modified logos and player names spelled differently than the real ones. Even a randomly generated roster would work - and could work BETTER, for replay value. Even then, can one type of game make a monopoly? Saying that would lead us to say that Sega has a monopoly on games like Sonic, or that Bioware has a monopoly on Star Wars RPGs. Even taking into account all the other games that EA makes, they're still not a monopoly. Big, yes. Biggest, certainly. But they're still not even a majority of the video game industry, let alone a monopoly.
3. For the same reason nobody's done anything about Microsoft. When the gorrilla wants the best seat in the monkey house, the capuchins aren't going to pursuade him to move.
3a. Great and fine, but you'll never get enough people behind it. Try, though, even an unheard and unnoticed protest is a protest just the same.
4. As a consumer, you also have the right to influence other consumers. By telling them WHY EA is a bad company, you hope to also get them to excercise their rights as consumers.
5. And if somebody made a football game with mutants now, it wouldn't be innovation. NFL Blitz was innovation, but now if another game goes that route, it won't be innovative either. Where does it go from here? Invent a new, simmilar game? Is it still football at that point?
6. I don't remember them being good before 92 either.
It could happen in any place, but the point is, it's very unlikely to happen to them all.
Take, for example, this scenario: Man lives on earth, has space stations scattered around, and colonies on the moon and Mars.
Now, an asteroid hits Earth, there's a nuclear war, eruption of a super-volcano like Yellowstone, and human life on Earth is either extinguished, put in grave peril, or just made all-around miserable. Mankind still survives as a whole in space and elsewhere.
The odds of any one catastrphe befalling Earth is low. The odds of it befalling one of our off-planet colonies is the same, if not lower - No atmosphere on the moon, so not much chance of lunar warming. No groundwater to contaminate, no biosphere to disrupt. Far less people and probably better control, meaning less risk of war.
However, the chance of it hitting all of them at once is so low as to be zero (with the possible exception of war. Nations on Earth may attack colonies of other nations in space, citizens of different countries on earth may become polarized in the same disputes off-planet, etc). If majot catastrphy suddenly hits Earth, all our space stations, the Moon, Mars, and some shuttle traveling in between at once, then somebody probably has it out for us anyway and we're screwed either way.
How many of those WalMart flyers advertise fraudulent products?
Never shopped at WalMart, eh?
I always did think he looked like Pintsize now.
Because product placement has meant more creative and ambitions movies? Maybe you didn't see the preview that got posted yesterday for the Hitch Hiker's Guide movie? "Ford, this is terrible. We're getting thrown out of an alien spacecraft and I can't get a connection on my Nokia phone!" The point is, product placements have never improved anything. Companies throw together crappy movies and turn them into one big advertisement. What was The Italian Job if not a mini cooper advertisement?
I've been playing under AO's free plan, and have barely noticed the billboards. There have been billboards up for as long as I've played the game, but before the advertised popular cars, guns, and tourist attractions in-game, they're just replaced now.
Here
Not 2:1 in totals, but in weekly sales, it was until the last week of March.
Those numbers are sales in Japan as of the end of March. The PSP has 623k sold this year, DS has 485k. In the last week of March, the DS had 55k and the PSP had 43k, but the week before, the DS only had 22k. I saw numbers from before that that were pretty much the same.
The jump was because the new colors came out that week. I'm not sure if it's managed to hang onto those numbers or not. The site they link to as their source doesn't seem to have detailed hardware sales up right now, but they do have % shares of total hardware sales. The DS is at 30%, the PSP is only 24%, so it looks like they have at least partially.
Too soon to say where it'll go.
There's a major difference, though. First off, there are virtually no female murderers before the industrial revolution, and it goes down the farther back you go. Also, of those that there have been, the vast majority are murderers that people can sympathise with. They had a reason to kill, even if it may not justify killing, it was certainly a good reason to be very angry. Men, on the other hand, who have nothing going against them in life have been known to kill people over a pair of shoes.
It's not layered, though, as I understand it. Somebody had some good links (and a cheap diagram) above. The "3D" part comes in that the magnetic axis is perpendicular to the drive platter, not parrallel. Think of it like taking 500 bar magnets and first setting them end-to-end, and then standing them up on end and setting them that way. They take up less room, so you can fit more of them on the same area. There's no stacking or layering involved.
Yes, Shattered Galaxy. In fact, reading this article, it sounds much less like an RTS than SG is.
Microsoft did not impose those sentences. RTFA. A judge did. The "fine" was not a fine, it was restitution he was ordered to pay Microsoft. Microsoft has the right to suggest that the judge replace the damages with a community service sentence.
Windows are a neccessary element of a house, but INSECURE windows are not.
They make windows that can survive getting a rock or brick thrown at them with minimal visual distortion.
Even if you don't do that, all home security systems have dirt cheap break sensors that go on all windows. Ours came standard with ten of them, and additional ones were a whole $1.50 each. You break a window, and you trigger the alarm, which not only sends in an emergency call, but also makes a lot of noise and attracts unwanted attention from the neighbors.
Computers have nothing to do with it. $800 has been grounds to get the proverbial cap popped in your proverbial ass for years. Wars have been fought over so much.
Verbal contracts are legally binding, but it's harder to prove in court. If XXX says that they lentt YYY to ZZZ, and then ZZZ says that YYY was a gift, then the judge has a hard time sorting out the circumstances of the exchange. If no other evidence comes to light, the judge will side with the defendant (plaintiff must win by preponderance of evidence in civil court). Then again, that's all US law, not Chinese. Contract law is pretty daunting stuff just if you go from one state to the other in the US, let alone overseas.
Like I posted above, in this case, the guy may not even have equated the vitual property with real property. He lent somebody else the sword, who then sold it for a large sum of money. $800 is a lot of money, and people have been killed over smaller sums. It'd be nice to know how this would have played out, say, if the sword was lost or looted rather than sold. In that case, the sword is lost, but that's it. The killer may have been angry or annoyed, but I doubt he would have killed for it. But selling it, there's more at stake than just a digital sword. There's been a violation of trust, you lent somebody something and they betrayed you, and there's also now around $800 USD in the mix.
I have to wonder if this would have happened if the victim lost the sword, rather than selling it for over $1000. It's one thing to borrow something and then break or loose it. It's another to borrow it and then sell it for a personal profit.
Nope. Maybe there's a "zero-day" warranty where if it's shipped broken you have to replace it, but the legal definition of "broken" has a pretty high standard. For example, to get a car replaced under the lemmon laws in Michigan, you need to have it repaired for the same problem three times within one year while under warranty and then have it develop the same problem again.
Mine has one in the top screen and two in the bottom (althouth the ones in the bottom are right along the edge, and they had to be pointed out to me to even see them). My Visor Prism has a dead subpixel, but it's also near the edge. My laptop monitor has about 20 or so, but it's an old (1999) computer and has seen a lot of use.
It happens, it's not usually a big deal, but when I get an LCD that has dead pixels that interfere with use, I will complain.