Why on earth would insurance pay for a full-on surgery to extract wisdom teeth? It can be done easily at the dentist's office for a third of the cost.
Not that I disagree with your point --- I agree with you --- but for this particular point, the answer is sometimes it's necessary. (And that one went well. If you've read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, you'll know what I mean when I say that sometimes it goes really badly...)
One of the most basic is the "tragedy of the commons," which basically says that if an individual can profit in the short term by overusing or damaging a communal resource, the "invisible hand" will end up destroying that resource.
Not to mention that the fact that the invisible hand takes time to work. Oil too expensive? Fine except it now becomes profitable to invest in renewable energy. Except... it takes, say, twenty years of investment before renewable energy becomes feasible; you don't have that time. And oil is still too expensive.
You have to start investing before it's too late, and using purely open-market economics, that's not going to happen because it's not profitable in the short term.
Assuming this isn't just a troll post, I'll explain it as I saw it. I believe they were making fun of the change in light patterns that movies always portrayed when a ship started to go faster.
Mmf. That's it? I was expecting something... well, funnier. I was assuming that 'plaid' had some connotations in the US that they don't over here.
Well, now I understand it --- but I still don't get it.
You know, it's probably just a cultural thing, and I know that jokes should never be explained, but... I just don't get this. I never have. Would anyone like to illuminate me?
The conclusion is invalid because YOU happen to know that it's invalid. It certainly could be valid given only the rules presented. As an example, if you used Superman and Metroplis in the above example, it would work fine.
Rule 2 does not provide any information about the reality of its parameters. Stating things a bit more formally:
isA(dracula, vampire)
locatedIn(dracula, transylvania)
locatedIn(transylvania, romania)
~isReal(vampire)
These aren't rules, they're statements providing one-way inferences. You may only create forward logic chains. There aren't really any interesting conclusions you can come up with from this, apart from being able to state that some unreal things live in Romania.
Shirky gives examples of some of Dodgson's syllogisms (and Dodgson is a master among logicians). Dogson's syllogisms are interesting because they're based around rules. Take the one about poems:
No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste.
No modern poetry is free from affectation.
All your poems are on the subject of soap-bubbles.
No affected poetry is popular among people of real taste.
No ancient poetry is on the subject of soap-bubbles.
He uses generic statements, rather than absolute statements. You can see this if I restate it:
isInteresting(X) IMPLIES ~isPopular(X)
isModern(X) IMPLIES isAffected(X)
isYours(X) IMPLIES isAboutBubbles(X)
isAffected(X) IMPLIES ~isPopular(X)
~isModern(X) IMPLIES ~isAboutBubbles(X)
Notice that all these rules have to be specified in generic terms. We have equations we can manipulate. This means we can use them. There's an rule that ~A IMPLIES B == B IMPLIES A which lets us restate as follows::
~isPopular(X) IMPLIES isInteresting(X)
isModern(X) IMPLIES isAffected(X)
isYours(X) IMPLIES isAboutBubbles(X)
isAffected(X) IMPLIES ~isPopular(X)
isAboutBubbles(X) IMPLIES isModern(X)
And from here it's just a matter of substituting in, since (A IMPLIES (B IMPLIES C)) == (A IMPLIES C). This means that we can prove that your poems are modern, affected and uninteresting, but popular.
You need the statements to provide the fundamental information, and the rules to let you manipulate that information. (Dodgson avoids needing a statement by using rule 2 instead; it would work just as well had rule 2 been ~isInteresting(yourPoem), but that would only let you prove that yourPoem was uninteresting, not that all your poems are uninteresting.).
Shirky's trying to discredit the Semantic Web by using a syllogism of his own, that goes like this:
Syllogisms that don't contain rules are useless.
The Semantic Web is constructed out of syllogisms.
From this he's trying to draw the erroneous conclusion that the Semantic Web is useless. I leave the problem with this as an exercise to the reader.
Seeing as he is apparently trained in this stuff, which I am not, this makes me think that he is either (a) incompetant or (b) is deliberately trying to mislead people. Either way, I don't trust his logic.
If you'd like an opposing view, make sure to read Clay Shirky's take on the semantic web.
Having just read quite a lot of his article before becoming far too annoyed to go any further, I really wouldn't take him very seriously. The bulk of his complaint is that although the Semantic Web is about drawing conclusions from widely disparate pieces of data, people don't think like that. I have no complaint with this.
However, he attempts to illustrates his point with lots of syllogisms. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to understand them. For example, he uses this one:
Count Dracula is a Vampire
Count Dracula lives in Transylvania
Transylvania is a region of Romania
Vampires are not real
...to illustrate that despite the fact that all the above statements are correct, the only conclusion you can draw is that Romania is not real.
Huh?
The only way you can come to that conclusion is if you assume that statement 2 implies that, if X lives in Y and X is not real, then Y is not real. Which is an invalid assumption. Therefore his conclusion is not valid.
The entire essay is full of things like this. When he's talking in generalities, he makes a small amount of sense, but as soon as he starts using specifics, he stops making sense. There may be something to his basic point, but I'm not inclined to trust someone's opinions on a fundamentally logic-based concept who seems to be so inept at using logic. Treat with caution.
What's wrong with simply burying the waste at the bottom of a very, very deep hole somewhere in a geologically active subduction zone? That way the waste will get sucked into the mantle fairly quickly (on a geological timescale). The material will then dissolve and disperse.
And since the mantle's already highly radioactive --- radioactive heating is one of the things that drives Earth's geology --- the fact that the waste is radioactive is hardly going to be a problem.
Provided you make sure that the initial hole is deep enough to be well under the water table, this form of disposal should be both cheap and entirely safe.
IANARS, but it also appears that the Tier One design is highly scalable. Just make a large enough plane that can achieve a high altitude that can carry a large enough orbiter and fuel, and this thing can become a new LEO personnel or unmanned shuttle, or the much-lamented spaceplane.
Alas, it can't; there are fundamental reasons why SpaceShipOne or any similar vehicle can't get into orbit. This principally boil down to not being able to get enough delta-V from that rocket technology, and no thermal protection system for reentry. Changing the propulsion system and adding a TPS would involve a fundamental redesign from scratch.
What it is is a good technology demonstrator. They're getting experience in dealing with multistage vehicles, rocket propulsion, freefall attitude control, supersonic flight, etc; all well worth while, and all necessary on the path to a real orbital vehicle.
Plus the PR benefits are huge, too --- you could probably write the whole Tier One programme off as advertising. Think how much publicity Scaled Composites has gotten out of this...
It will be necessary to develop an illegal, but parallel, FDA to ensure that this black-market equipment is reasonablely safe and reliable.
Actually, these already exist: other countries. Pretty much every country has its own equivalent of the FDA. While I probably wouldn't trust equipment that had only been certified by Tibet or Iran, I would trust equipment that had been certified by Canada, Europe, or Australia, say.
Plus, because it's now all completely legal, it's a hell of a lot easier to get hold of. You might have trouble getting it through US Customs' labynthine import laws unless you can persuade them that the equipment's not for medical use, but the vendors would be more than happy to sell it to you, if you had the money...
I have several old laptops that I current run as servers. It seems that it is quite common for old laptop batteries to die and refuse to hold a charge. Suddenly, they become pretty decent servers if you set them up to remain running with the top closed.
Yup, same here. My main house server, tiar, is a P166 laptop with 48MB of RAM (which is the maximum it can support, worst luck). It runs Debian and does SMTP (via exim), NNTP (via sn), mailing lists (via minimalist), web serves (via thttpd), is my wireless access point (only ad-hoc, though), firewalls (using netfilter), plus serves files (slowly) to my intranet... it's great. Compiling a kernel on it does take a while, though.
The great thing about laptops is that they're (a) small, (b) quiet, (c) have built in keyboard and monitor, and (d) have a built-in UPS. Yup, even a crapped out battery that won't hold a charge for more than ten minutes will give you ten minutes of shutdown time if the power goes out. I haven't yet found any UPS software that will treat the APM battery as a UPS device, but even doing it all manually it works fine...
If you had a filesystem 2^64 bytes wide, and your average porn jpeg was 100kB, then this means that you could store 1x10^14 images on it. That's 100'000'000'000'000 of them.
Assuming you're male and heterosexual, this means that every woman on the planet would have to take 30'000 compromising pictures of herself to fill it up; or about 60'000 assuming you're not into the weird stuff.
All orbit is is free fall with enough horizontal velocity to match. Orbit simply is fast free fall. Zero-g exists in orbit. How is this different?
Zero-gee is when you're in completely flat space. You're not accelerating due to gravity, because there isn't any.
Free fall is when you're in bent space, and are accelerating due to gravity. The space station is falling at one gee; but it's falling sideways, and everything in it is falling at roughly the same speed, so there's very little relative acceleration between the objects on board.
Both these terms are so badly abused that microgravity tends to be used these days instead. Which is a shame, because it's just as confusing. Free fall is a much more accurate description of what's going on.
(BTW, skydivers aren't, technically, in free fall. They're falling freely, sure, but once they reach terminal velocity they're not accelerating any more.)
theyworkforyou.com
on
Hacking Congress
·
· Score: 2, Informative
...is a site that does much the same sort of thing for the UK government. It's a screen-scraping front end to Hansard; Hansard is the official record of pretty much everything that goes on in parliament, ever. The data's all available online but in an extremely inaccessible manner.
They Work For You indexes, collates and cross-references it all. You can do keyword searches across all speeches and debates. It will let you do such things as look up your MP by postcode, find their speeches, see their track record (my MP rebels against her party fairly frequently, for example), and comment. You can attach comments practically anywhere. They provide a public forum where you can discuss what your government says, as they say it.
It's cross-referenced to all kinds of other political resources on the 'net; it has RSS feeds for just about everything --- it is deeply, deeply cool, and a genuinely important resource to anyone interested in UK politics. Oh, yeah, and it's all open source, of course.
You could do far, far worse to adopt something similar.
What you're proposing is a good ol' fashioned consensus government. I can tell you, many countries have tried these... Germany, England, Ireland...
Actually, Britain has a majority government and has had for years; I believe the last time there was a consensus government (not the right term, can't remember what it is right now) was during World War II. But you're right, consensus governments are very popular in a lot of mainland Europe and work really well. I wish we had one.
Currently Britain has two major parties, Labour (in power) and Conservative, and a number of minor parties, the largest of which is the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems are big enough to scare the two big parties. In the 2001 election, Labour got 413 seats, the Conservatives 166 and the Lib Dems 52. (The next biggest party, the Scottish National Party, got 6.)
This means that while the bulk of our political process is, like yours, simply a matter of the two big parties trading voters, they also run the risk of losing voters to the Lib Dems if they do anything unpopular. While they're unlikely to ever get into power any time soon, they make an excellent watchdog for the two major parties, and specialise in things like bringing unpopular topics to the government's attention --- they don't have anything to lose, you see.
If you look at the full results for 2001, you can see that the Lib Dems had the biggest gain. I expect to see a similar large gain in the next general election; Labour has made itself exceedingly unpopular in the Iraq affair, and while alienated Labour voters are unlikely to vote Conservative, the Lib Dems are a much more acceptable alternative.
Personally, I think it's a shame the US doesn't have a similar viable third party. They're great for keeping the big parties on their toes. Alas, I don't think you're ever likely to get one; the two-party system is too heavily ingrained. Of course, you don't go in for party politics the same way we do.
This is extremely good news! As I said previously, if we had lost any of the orbiters, the shuttle program would be over.
Over? Hardly. The Chinese are coming on in leaps and bounds, and the Russians have been launching humans into to space (and bringing them back again) cheaply and reliably for years. In fact, in a lot of ways it would be a good thing if the shuttle program got cancelled; maybe it would spur NASA on to produce something a bit more efficient than the aircraft-shaped pile of money that's the shuttle.
Even just investing in the Russian space program a bit would be a start. I'm afraid that with Russia's economy in the state it is, the Soyuz programme might get canned, and if it does all that expertise and engineering experience would be lost.
(You could probably buy the Russian space programme, lock stock and engineering staff, for what it costs to build one shuttle.)
It would seem that in 30 years of Natural Language processing advancements and so forth, that it would be possible to revive text adventure type games.
NLP never really came into it, but these days they are better. Much better. Partly it's better parsers, but mostly it's having more memory so you can have bigger dictionaries of words.
The standard sort of thing you can do with parsers these days looks like this:
> n The door to the north is locked. > unlock door What with? > key Do you mean the gold key or the silver key? > gold You unlock the door. The key crumbles into dust.
There is a vending machine in front of you. A small pile of coins stands in front of it. > examine coins There are five red ones and six green ones. > get all the red coins Taken. > put three red coins and one green coin into the vending machine (Taking the green coin first) You receive a dead babel fish. > drop all but one of the red coins Dropped. >
Look, you can't come up with a name that bad by accident. They must have done it on purpose.
My theory is that some Linux fanatic in the DoD is giving the finger to a certain Unix vendor. Which one? Say the acronym out loud and you'll get it...
There's three huge problems I've got with Frozen Bubble.
Firstly: the UI design isn't great. In particular, the two little widgets that tell you what colour of bubble you're going to fire now and next. The now one is part of the graphic design for the launcher, which deemphasises it. This means that your attention is drawn to the next one instead. I can't count the number of times I've fired a bubble into the wrong place because I've been looking at next instead of now.
The levels don't ramp very well. The difficulty remains, on average, the same all the way through. This means that there's never any feeling of getting somewhere.
And, the big one: not enough music. What music there is is great. But there's just one track, that gets played over and over and over and over again until you start going insane... either it needs a decent playlist, or else it needs a track that loops properly so it isn't quite so obvious when it stops and restarts.
But apart from that, it's a pretty nice game. <flame>Even if it is written in perl...</flame>
I've become rather fond of Vantage Master, which someone pointed me at the last time this topic came up. It's a rather cool tactical wargame featuring two dueling wizards on a three-dimensional hex board. Your primary mode of attack is to summon various strange creatures.
It's deceptively sophisticated --- put more simply, I suck. Each creature you summon has an associated element, and there's a strict order of precedence between the elements. Choosing your creatures to counter your opponent's is the key to the game. It's definitely made for wargame fans.
Despite being quite dated, it's still a lot of fun. The graphics are old but well done and perfectly adequate; it's full of well-presented little animations whenever anything happens. It's got a lot of nice touches like the fact that when you create a character, it runs you through a short personality test to find the right one for you... and there's something going on with Tarot cards I haven't figured out yet.
One of the attractions is the really, really bad translation from the Japanese. There's enough information there to actually play the game, but there's a weird air of surreality about the whole experience; particularly the cut scenes describing the ongoing plot. I've no idea what they're about --- my character seems to spend a lot of time talking to some woman with a dog, uttering the kind of cryptic runes you get when you try and speak Japanese without the right font installed!
Oh, yeah, and the fact that the title theme song is a direct ripoff of Limahl's Neverending Story has to be a point in its favour.
Alas, it's Windows only and doesn't run properly under Wine (it runs, but there's no sound and it's far too slow).
Slashdot Mirror
Because there still are some, here and there. 'Net access isn't as ubiquitous as you think it is.
Not that I disagree with your point --- I agree with you --- but for this particular point, the answer is sometimes it's necessary. (And that one went well. If you've read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, you'll know what I mean when I say that sometimes it goes really badly...)
Not to mention that the fact that the invisible hand takes time to work. Oil too expensive? Fine except it now becomes profitable to invest in renewable energy. Except... it takes, say, twenty years of investment before renewable energy becomes feasible; you don't have that time. And oil is still too expensive.
You have to start investing before it's too late, and using purely open-market economics, that's not going to happen because it's not profitable in the short term.
You do realise that the oxygen you're burning it with is actually nuclear waste produced in giant, orbiting fusion reactors?
> CONVERT LEAD INTO GOLD
Definition of convert - WordReference.com Dictionary...
Darn. And I thought Google could do everything.
I have. I've seen it many times and I love it. I've just never understood the point of that particular bit.
It sounds like plaid is just one of those things that strikes Americans as being intrinsically funny, which isn't over here...
Mmf. That's it? I was expecting something... well, funnier. I was assuming that 'plaid' had some connotations in the US that they don't over here.
Well, now I understand it --- but I still don't get it.
You know, it's probably just a cultural thing, and I know that jokes should never be explained, but... I just don't get this. I never have. Would anyone like to illuminate me?
Rule 2 does not provide any information about the reality of its parameters. Stating things a bit more formally:
These aren't rules, they're statements providing one-way inferences. You may only create forward logic chains. There aren't really any interesting conclusions you can come up with from this, apart from being able to state that some unreal things live in Romania.
Shirky gives examples of some of Dodgson's syllogisms (and Dodgson is a master among logicians). Dogson's syllogisms are interesting because they're based around rules. Take the one about poems:
He uses generic statements, rather than absolute statements. You can see this if I restate it:
Notice that all these rules have to be specified in generic terms. We have equations we can manipulate. This means we can use them. There's an rule that ~A IMPLIES B == B IMPLIES A which lets us restate as follows::
And from here it's just a matter of substituting in, since (A IMPLIES (B IMPLIES C)) == (A IMPLIES C). This means that we can prove that your poems are modern, affected and uninteresting, but popular.
You need the statements to provide the fundamental information, and the rules to let you manipulate that information. (Dodgson avoids needing a statement by using rule 2 instead; it would work just as well had rule 2 been ~isInteresting(yourPoem), but that would only let you prove that yourPoem was uninteresting, not that all your poems are uninteresting.).
Shirky's trying to discredit the Semantic Web by using a syllogism of his own, that goes like this:
From this he's trying to draw the erroneous conclusion that the Semantic Web is useless. I leave the problem with this as an exercise to the reader.
Seeing as he is apparently trained in this stuff, which I am not, this makes me think that he is either (a) incompetant or (b) is deliberately trying to mislead people. Either way, I don't trust his logic.
Having just read quite a lot of his article before becoming far too annoyed to go any further, I really wouldn't take him very seriously. The bulk of his complaint is that although the Semantic Web is about drawing conclusions from widely disparate pieces of data, people don't think like that. I have no complaint with this.
However, he attempts to illustrates his point with lots of syllogisms. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to understand them. For example, he uses this one:
...to illustrate that despite the fact that all the above statements are correct, the only conclusion you can draw is that Romania is not real.
Huh?
The only way you can come to that conclusion is if you assume that statement 2 implies that, if X lives in Y and X is not real, then Y is not real. Which is an invalid assumption. Therefore his conclusion is not valid.
The entire essay is full of things like this. When he's talking in generalities, he makes a small amount of sense, but as soon as he starts using specifics, he stops making sense. There may be something to his basic point, but I'm not inclined to trust someone's opinions on a fundamentally logic-based concept who seems to be so inept at using logic. Treat with caution.
And since the mantle's already highly radioactive --- radioactive heating is one of the things that drives Earth's geology --- the fact that the waste is radioactive is hardly going to be a problem.
Provided you make sure that the initial hole is deep enough to be well under the water table, this form of disposal should be both cheap and entirely safe.
Alas, it can't; there are fundamental reasons why SpaceShipOne or any similar vehicle can't get into orbit. This principally boil down to not being able to get enough delta-V from that rocket technology, and no thermal protection system for reentry. Changing the propulsion system and adding a TPS would involve a fundamental redesign from scratch.
What it is is a good technology demonstrator. They're getting experience in dealing with multistage vehicles, rocket propulsion, freefall attitude control, supersonic flight, etc; all well worth while, and all necessary on the path to a real orbital vehicle.
Plus the PR benefits are huge, too --- you could probably write the whole Tier One programme off as advertising. Think how much publicity Scaled Composites has gotten out of this...
Actually, these already exist: other countries. Pretty much every country has its own equivalent of the FDA. While I probably wouldn't trust equipment that had only been certified by Tibet or Iran, I would trust equipment that had been certified by Canada, Europe, or Australia, say.
Plus, because it's now all completely legal, it's a hell of a lot easier to get hold of. You might have trouble getting it through US Customs' labynthine import laws unless you can persuade them that the equipment's not for medical use, but the vendors would be more than happy to sell it to you, if you had the money...
Yup, same here. My main house server, tiar, is a P166 laptop with 48MB of RAM (which is the maximum it can support, worst luck). It runs Debian and does SMTP (via exim), NNTP (via sn), mailing lists (via minimalist), web serves (via thttpd), is my wireless access point (only ad-hoc, though), firewalls (using netfilter), plus serves files (slowly) to my intranet... it's great. Compiling a kernel on it does take a while, though.
The great thing about laptops is that they're (a) small, (b) quiet, (c) have built in keyboard and monitor, and (d) have a built-in UPS. Yup, even a crapped out battery that won't hold a charge for more than ten minutes will give you ten minutes of shutdown time if the power goes out. I haven't yet found any UPS software that will treat the APM battery as a UPS device, but even doing it all manually it works fine...
Hmm.
If you had a filesystem 2^64 bytes wide, and your average porn jpeg was 100kB, then this means that you could store 1x10^14 images on it. That's 100'000'000'000'000 of them.
Assuming you're male and heterosexual, this means that every woman on the planet would have to take 30'000 compromising pictures of herself to fill it up; or about 60'000 assuming you're not into the weird stuff.
You're right, that's a lot of porn.
Zero-gee is when you're in completely flat space. You're not accelerating due to gravity, because there isn't any.
Free fall is when you're in bent space, and are accelerating due to gravity. The space station is falling at one gee; but it's falling sideways, and everything in it is falling at roughly the same speed, so there's very little relative acceleration between the objects on board.
Both these terms are so badly abused that microgravity tends to be used these days instead. Which is a shame, because it's just as confusing. Free fall is a much more accurate description of what's going on.
(BTW, skydivers aren't, technically, in free fall. They're falling freely, sure, but once they reach terminal velocity they're not accelerating any more.)
They Work For You indexes, collates and cross-references it all. You can do keyword searches across all speeches and debates. It will let you do such things as look up your MP by postcode, find their speeches, see their track record (my MP rebels against her party fairly frequently, for example), and comment. You can attach comments practically anywhere. They provide a public forum where you can discuss what your government says, as they say it.
It's cross-referenced to all kinds of other political resources on the 'net; it has RSS feeds for just about everything --- it is deeply, deeply cool, and a genuinely important resource to anyone interested in UK politics. Oh, yeah, and it's all open source, of course.
You could do far, far worse to adopt something similar.
Actually, Britain has a majority government and has had for years; I believe the last time there was a consensus government (not the right term, can't remember what it is right now) was during World War II. But you're right, consensus governments are very popular in a lot of mainland Europe and work really well. I wish we had one.
Currently Britain has two major parties, Labour (in power) and Conservative, and a number of minor parties, the largest of which is the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems are big enough to scare the two big parties. In the 2001 election, Labour got 413 seats, the Conservatives 166 and the Lib Dems 52. (The next biggest party, the Scottish National Party, got 6.)
This means that while the bulk of our political process is, like yours, simply a matter of the two big parties trading voters, they also run the risk of losing voters to the Lib Dems if they do anything unpopular. While they're unlikely to ever get into power any time soon, they make an excellent watchdog for the two major parties, and specialise in things like bringing unpopular topics to the government's attention --- they don't have anything to lose, you see.
If you look at the full results for 2001, you can see that the Lib Dems had the biggest gain. I expect to see a similar large gain in the next general election; Labour has made itself exceedingly unpopular in the Iraq affair, and while alienated Labour voters are unlikely to vote Conservative, the Lib Dems are a much more acceptable alternative.
Personally, I think it's a shame the US doesn't have a similar viable third party. They're great for keeping the big parties on their toes. Alas, I don't think you're ever likely to get one; the two-party system is too heavily ingrained. Of course, you don't go in for party politics the same way we do.
Which candidate has the bigger campaign budget? IIRC, for about forty years now, the candidate who spent most always wins...
Over? Hardly. The Chinese are coming on in leaps and bounds, and the Russians have been launching humans into to space (and bringing them back again) cheaply and reliably for years. In fact, in a lot of ways it would be a good thing if the shuttle program got cancelled; maybe it would spur NASA on to produce something a bit more efficient than the aircraft-shaped pile of money that's the shuttle.
Even just investing in the Russian space program a bit would be a start. I'm afraid that with Russia's economy in the state it is, the Soyuz programme might get canned, and if it does all that expertise and engineering experience would be lost.
(You could probably buy the Russian space programme, lock stock and engineering staff, for what it costs to build one shuttle.)
NLP never really came into it, but these days they are better. Much better. Partly it's better parsers, but mostly it's having more memory so you can have bigger dictionaries of words.
The standard sort of thing you can do with parsers these days looks like this:
My theory is that some Linux fanatic in the DoD is giving the finger to a certain Unix vendor. Which one? Say the acronym out loud and you'll get it...
Firstly: the UI design isn't great. In particular, the two little widgets that tell you what colour of bubble you're going to fire now and next. The now one is part of the graphic design for the launcher, which deemphasises it. This means that your attention is drawn to the next one instead. I can't count the number of times I've fired a bubble into the wrong place because I've been looking at next instead of now.
The levels don't ramp very well. The difficulty remains, on average, the same all the way through. This means that there's never any feeling of getting somewhere.
And, the big one: not enough music. What music there is is great. But there's just one track, that gets played over and over and over and over again until you start going insane... either it needs a decent playlist, or else it needs a track that loops properly so it isn't quite so obvious when it stops and restarts.
But apart from that, it's a pretty nice game. <flame>Even if it is written in perl...</flame>
I leave the moral of this story as an exercise for the reader.
It's deceptively sophisticated --- put more simply, I suck. Each creature you summon has an associated element, and there's a strict order of precedence between the elements. Choosing your creatures to counter your opponent's is the key to the game. It's definitely made for wargame fans.
Despite being quite dated, it's still a lot of fun. The graphics are old but well done and perfectly adequate; it's full of well-presented little animations whenever anything happens. It's got a lot of nice touches like the fact that when you create a character, it runs you through a short personality test to find the right one for you... and there's something going on with Tarot cards I haven't figured out yet.
One of the attractions is the really, really bad translation from the Japanese. There's enough information there to actually play the game, but there's a weird air of surreality about the whole experience; particularly the cut scenes describing the ongoing plot. I've no idea what they're about --- my character seems to spend a lot of time talking to some woman with a dog, uttering the kind of cryptic runes you get when you try and speak Japanese without the right font installed!
Oh, yeah, and the fact that the title theme song is a direct ripoff of Limahl's Neverending Story has to be a point in its favour.
Alas, it's Windows only and doesn't run properly under Wine (it runs, but there's no sound and it's far too slow).