Nintendo has heart? nah. Nintendo has aging characters and a poor image among adult gamers.
I expect to see Nintendo making inroads into adult gamers again, as they move from young adult to family adult.
With the Gamecube price having hit $99, I bought it as the "kids' console". In doing so, I have discovered how fun the games are. This dynamic should give Nintendo a window in which to win back some adult gamers.
Well, the cell phone providers are leasing the public airwaves in order to send their signals. Accountability for how these public assets are being used SHOULD be part of that agreement, though it may not have been written that way.
The most compelling argument for buying an SUV is that in one you are most likely to survive a crash with an SUV.
That is true. However, you are also less likely to be able to avoid an accident, because they don't handle as well. How the results balance out are arguable (and people love to argue about such things), but it's probably safe to say that the better a driver you are, the better off you would be in a smaller, more maneuverable car (or motorcycle) than in an SUV (looking purely at safety).
Which, of course, would just leave the dangerous drivers in the SUVs, where they would be more likely to kill everyone else. Hmmm.
You forgot that the Cyrillic letter that looks like a "B" is pronounced like a "V", and the letter that looks like a "P" is pronounced like an "R".
Which sets up my weird dyslexic note. In English writing, I have always tended to confuse B's and P's fairly frequently. So, as you can imagine, when I was learning Russian, I often confused the letter that looks like a B with the letter that looks like a P.
The weird part was that at that point, I started confusing, in English, my R's with my V's.
I know no one cares about that either, but that's gotta say something about how the wiring works.
this is one of the areas where it makes sense. Both indutries are intensely project oriented, and both are "cool" and "fun" , so workers are willing to work for peanuts to get into it.
What's interesting is that the movie biz is heavily unionized, so the movie studios can't really take advantage of the impulse to hire cheap labor and work them to death.
In response to that, the movie studios have had to develop project management down to a fine art, because that's the only way they had to cut labor costs. It has the pleasant side-effect of making it more cost-effective to hire talented workers and treat them well.
Things will only get better for game programmers when the gaming companies can organize their projects as well as the studios do. What will be interesting to see is what it takes to make that happen. Inefficient companies going out of business, and successful ones leading by example? Or external pressures from workers suing or organizing themselves? I'd believe either.
Yet I thought to myself: "why should I help this man run his restaurant better? He'll just compete against me better. Fuggedaboutit."
It depends on whether or not the restaurant business is a zero-sum game. If him improving his business meant that you would lose, then yes that would be stupid.
But maybe, the more often restaurant customers have a good experience at a restaurant, the more likely they are to eat out more often. Perhaps by helping this man improve his restaurant, you're helping yourself out too, by growing the whole industry.
Or maybe, by reducing the rate of restaurant failures in your area, you make them look like better investments, which makes you more likely to get a bank loan to improve your own business. (Yes, I know, a bank wanting to make a loan to a restaurant is pretty far-fetched.)
Or...okay, I'll stop. I could come up with more, but it's also true that there are plenty of other reasons you could have come up with for *not* talking to the manager, the biggest being that the jerk probably wouldn't have even bothered to listen to you. But I get tired of people taking the competition in capitalism to an extreme.
Yes, competition is healthy and good. But cutthroat competition usually hurts the overall system, leaving even the "winner" in worse shape than they could have been.
Now if only this related to Microsoft somehow, then this would be on-topic. Hmmmm...
Yeah, but if the summary is to be believed, this is not $300K per programmer, but $300K per employee. So you can't add that multiplier in for overhead departments, cause they're all employees too.
100% agree! That was my biggest complaint about the 3rd movie. Especially since if they'd revealed it the same way they did in the book (the palantir rolling away from his charred corpse), it would have only added about 1 min of screen time, including explanations.
This sounds like hindsight speaking, I know, but I always wondered why it was considered such a bad investment. I would have expected that even 3 mediocre movies of LoTR would have made back the $400M fairly easily just off of the hardcore fans. And then you would have a property that would, because of the nature of the fanbase, reliably sell DVDs in perpetuity.
I certainly wouldn't have expected it to be the cash cow that it's become. But a safe bet to make a little bit of money, yes.
But then, I too would sit through a 9 hour Silmarillion (I've always preferred that to the LoTR anyway), so what do I know.
Of course, as an old-school wargamer, I think of war as being an excercise in maneuvering hundreds of cardboard counters with arcane drawings on them across hex-gridded maps, while preventing your opponent from doing the same.
Which convinced me that you should only engage in war if you have at least an hour available per turn. And feel like arguing about the rules.
All of the Elves who originally went to Aman from Middle Earth in the First Age (including Galadriel and Elrond) also get to come to the West when they are ready.
Actually, *all* of the Elves get to go to Valinor, even the ones who haven't been there before. Only a very few of the Elves in Middle Earth in the Third Age had ever been to Valinor (Galadriel, for one), most either refused to go in the first place, or have been born since then (like Elrond).
It's also worth mentioning that Sam eventually goes West, since he was (for a brief time) a ring-bearer. It is also suggested that Gimli goes, too, though I don't remember what allows him to go.
Actually, the rules have changed for "hobby" businesses in the last couple of years, at least as far as they pertain to businesses in the arts. My wife is an (as of yet unpublished) author, so I have had to deal with this. I have also spoken to performers and artists, and it appears to work the same way for them, too.
There is not a profit requirement, but you do have to be able to demonstrate that you have treated your business as a business, and not a hobby. Joining professional organizations, having an agent, being able to document your work, all of these are things that can show that this is a job, and not a hobby. And, of course, making sales and getting paid doesn't hurt either.
None of this means that you won't get audited if you show 10 years of losses in a row, just that you ought to prevail in an audit situation, if you do everything right. And if you're not sure what "do everything right" means, then you should run all of this through your accountant before you deduct it.
It's deductible, but I believe your total expenses have to meet a certain threshhold (I want to say 2% of your AGI, but that's just a guess) before you can take the deduction. And, of course, you have to itemize. So, depending on individual circumstances, that may not work for everyone.
Well, he thinks that by showing people how they died, and the causes behind it, he can keep more people from being killed in the same way in the future. That certainly seems worthwhile to me. (You can disagree as to whether or not he is, in fact, being at all helpful, but not with his intent.)
And, oh yeah, he's making money from it, too. That's known as doing well by doing good, and I always considered that to be the best two-fer capitalism has to offer.
Well, if you look at the Senators and Congress Critters from Washington state, they are pretty overwhelmingly Democrats. The main Republican incumbent from WA (who I believe actually represented Redmond) was Jennifer Dunn, and she's not running for re-election, leaving a wide-open race.
This may just be a matter of keeping their local representatives loyal.
So I went and looked at theire financials, and it looks like they actually died back in 2000, with a horrendously bad year. They stayed afloat by borrowing a large amount of money (~$50 million), and the interest payments on that doubtless kept them below water ever since. Their operating cash flow has been negative ever since, with the only cash they've generated having been from the sale of stock. So really, it's just taken 3 years for their corpse to stop twitching.
The other thing I noticed which would have sent up an immediate red flag to me is that they factor their receivables. Now, it wouldn't surprise me if that was industry standard practice (this is not my industry), but in my experience the terms on factoring are usually so bad, that if you have to depend on that for your cash flow for more than a short time, you're already in danger. Maybe I'm just too cautious, but that's usually enough to keep me away from a company right there.
Didn't look like their G&A was particularly bad, or that their managers were unreasonably compensated. They just didn't sell enough games.
Even if they're not worried about pirating software, there's a good chance they'll wipe the hard drive just to try and make sure it's not virus-laden. That's what's happened to the computers I donated to my local schools.
Once you take the career out of politics, the money, power, and draw go with it, leaving little more than idealism to attract candidates. The politicians would drop like flies, sinking back into their drab (but lucrative) lives as lawyers, talk show hosts, and action movie stars.
No, what happens then is that the bureaucrats and staffers and lobbyists have even more power, because they don't have limits in how long they can be in their jobs. And they'll be the only ones who serve long enough to remember how things work.
Sadly, cutting the institutional memory out of the government wouldn't make it any less corrupt, just stupider.
The constitution gives politicians the right to borrow money on the credit of the US. I always find it suspicious that the founding fathers never included a clause of accountability for those borrowed funds.
Honestly, I think they just didn't want to tie the hands of the government by getting too specific on how that accountability would work. Remember, the government at that time was poor, and still had plenty of war debt. If the rules were too strict, it could have collapsed right at the beginning. The concept of accountability is implicit in the word "borrow", and that's really as specific as the Constitution tended to get.
I don't want to be too hard on the original GW or Thomas Jefferson or the rest but the concept of borrowing someone's horse and never returning it couldn't have been new. What of the concept of borrowing a horse, selling it for profit, and coming up with a sad sack story of how the horse was stolen and offering the lender a sum of about 50% what the horse was sold for by playing a pity trip?
Maybe, but that's way too complicated. They put eminent domain in the Constitution so that if they wanted to (sorry, that's *needed to*, of course) they could just take the horse.
There has NEVER been an audit of the federal reserve 12 private bank consortiums vaults
Even if there were such an audit would never come back as less than perfect.
Heh. You don't know any auditors, do you? I guarantee you that they would find *something* wrong, however minor. That's the only way they can prove they did something.
What's interesting to me is that there's no doubt in my mind that things are rigged, but I would argue that it's thousands of people rigging things in small ways, instead of a few people trying to do anything big. In fact, I would argue that the implosion of the current administration (maybe I'm jumping the gun here with that description, but it sure looks like that's where it's headed to me) is a classic case of people who were adept at rigging things on a small scale getting cocky and upping the scale of the operation, and so failing miserably. (That's the classic way white collar criminals get caught, of course. They have a good thing going, and then they get greedy, and get caught.)
What happens next? Maybe we're at one of those rare points where we can actually influence the structure of the system. Depends on how deep the outrage is, how long it lasts, and if there's anyone close enough to the power structure who actually cares to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
I expect to see Nintendo making inroads into adult gamers again, as they move from young adult to family adult.
With the Gamecube price having hit $99, I bought it as the "kids' console". In doing so, I have discovered how fun the games are. This dynamic should give Nintendo a window in which to win back some adult gamers.
Well, John Kerry actually fought in a war. I'd think that counts.
That is true. However, you are also less likely to be able to avoid an accident, because they don't handle as well. How the results balance out are arguable (and people love to argue about such things), but it's probably safe to say that the better a driver you are, the better off you would be in a smaller, more maneuverable car (or motorcycle) than in an SUV (looking purely at safety).
Which, of course, would just leave the dangerous drivers in the SUVs, where they would be more likely to kill everyone else. Hmmm.
Which sets up my weird dyslexic note. In English writing, I have always tended to confuse B's and P's fairly frequently. So, as you can imagine, when I was learning Russian, I often confused the letter that looks like a B with the letter that looks like a P.
The weird part was that at that point, I started confusing, in English, my R's with my V's.
I know no one cares about that either, but that's gotta say something about how the wiring works.
What's interesting is that the movie biz is heavily unionized, so the movie studios can't really take advantage of the impulse to hire cheap labor and work them to death.
In response to that, the movie studios have had to develop project management down to a fine art, because that's the only way they had to cut labor costs. It has the pleasant side-effect of making it more cost-effective to hire talented workers and treat them well.
Things will only get better for game programmers when the gaming companies can organize their projects as well as the studios do. What will be interesting to see is what it takes to make that happen. Inefficient companies going out of business, and successful ones leading by example? Or external pressures from workers suing or organizing themselves? I'd believe either.
Oh, but you said franchise. I guess IW screws that up.
It depends on whether or not the restaurant business is a zero-sum game. If him improving his business meant that you would lose, then yes that would be stupid.
But maybe, the more often restaurant customers have a good experience at a restaurant, the more likely they are to eat out more often. Perhaps by helping this man improve his restaurant, you're helping yourself out too, by growing the whole industry.
Or maybe, by reducing the rate of restaurant failures in your area, you make them look like better investments, which makes you more likely to get a bank loan to improve your own business. (Yes, I know, a bank wanting to make a loan to a restaurant is pretty far-fetched.)
Or...okay, I'll stop. I could come up with more, but it's also true that there are plenty of other reasons you could have come up with for *not* talking to the manager, the biggest being that the jerk probably wouldn't have even bothered to listen to you. But I get tired of people taking the competition in capitalism to an extreme.
Yes, competition is healthy and good. But cutthroat competition usually hurts the overall system, leaving even the "winner" in worse shape than they could have been.
Now if only this related to Microsoft somehow, then this would be on-topic. Hmmmm...
I certainly wouldn't have expected it to be the cash cow that it's become. But a safe bet to make a little bit of money, yes.
But then, I too would sit through a 9 hour Silmarillion (I've always preferred that to the LoTR anyway), so what do I know.
Of course, as an old-school wargamer, I think of war as being an excercise in maneuvering hundreds of cardboard counters with arcane drawings on them across hex-gridded maps, while preventing your opponent from doing the same.
Which convinced me that you should only engage in war if you have at least an hour available per turn. And feel like arguing about the rules.
All of the Elves who originally went to Aman from Middle Earth in the First Age (including Galadriel and Elrond) also get to come to the West when they are ready.
Actually, *all* of the Elves get to go to Valinor, even the ones who haven't been there before. Only a very few of the Elves in Middle Earth in the Third Age had ever been to Valinor (Galadriel, for one), most either refused to go in the first place, or have been born since then (like Elrond).
It's also worth mentioning that Sam eventually goes West, since he was (for a brief time) a ring-bearer. It is also suggested that Gimli goes, too, though I don't remember what allows him to go.
There is not a profit requirement, but you do have to be able to demonstrate that you have treated your business as a business, and not a hobby. Joining professional organizations, having an agent, being able to document your work, all of these are things that can show that this is a job, and not a hobby. And, of course, making sales and getting paid doesn't hurt either.
None of this means that you won't get audited if you show 10 years of losses in a row, just that you ought to prevail in an audit situation, if you do everything right. And if you're not sure what "do everything right" means, then you should run all of this through your accountant before you deduct it.
And, oh yeah, he's making money from it, too. That's known as doing well by doing good, and I always considered that to be the best two-fer capitalism has to offer.
This may just be a matter of keeping their local representatives loyal.
The other thing I noticed which would have sent up an immediate red flag to me is that they factor their receivables. Now, it wouldn't surprise me if that was industry standard practice (this is not my industry), but in my experience the terms on factoring are usually so bad, that if you have to depend on that for your cash flow for more than a short time, you're already in danger. Maybe I'm just too cautious, but that's usually enough to keep me away from a company right there.
Didn't look like their G&A was particularly bad, or that their managers were unreasonably compensated. They just didn't sell enough games.
No, what happens then is that the bureaucrats and staffers and lobbyists have even more power, because they don't have limits in how long they can be in their jobs. And they'll be the only ones who serve long enough to remember how things work.
Sadly, cutting the institutional memory out of the government wouldn't make it any less corrupt, just stupider.
Honestly, I think they just didn't want to tie the hands of the government by getting too specific on how that accountability would work. Remember, the government at that time was poor, and still had plenty of war debt. If the rules were too strict, it could have collapsed right at the beginning. The concept of accountability is implicit in the word "borrow", and that's really as specific as the Constitution tended to get.
I don't want to be too hard on the original GW or Thomas Jefferson or the rest but the concept of borrowing someone's horse and never returning it couldn't have been new. What of the concept of borrowing a horse, selling it for profit, and coming up with a sad sack story of how the horse was stolen and offering the lender a sum of about 50% what the horse was sold for by playing a pity trip?
Maybe, but that's way too complicated. They put eminent domain in the Constitution so that if they wanted to (sorry, that's *needed to*, of course) they could just take the horse.
There has NEVER been an audit of the federal reserve 12 private bank consortiums vaults Even if there were such an audit would never come back as less than perfect.
Heh. You don't know any auditors, do you? I guarantee you that they would find *something* wrong, however minor. That's the only way they can prove they did something.
What's interesting to me is that there's no doubt in my mind that things are rigged, but I would argue that it's thousands of people rigging things in small ways, instead of a few people trying to do anything big. In fact, I would argue that the implosion of the current administration (maybe I'm jumping the gun here with that description, but it sure looks like that's where it's headed to me) is a classic case of people who were adept at rigging things on a small scale getting cocky and upping the scale of the operation, and so failing miserably. (That's the classic way white collar criminals get caught, of course. They have a good thing going, and then they get greedy, and get caught.)
What happens next? Maybe we're at one of those rare points where we can actually influence the structure of the system. Depends on how deep the outrage is, how long it lasts, and if there's anyone close enough to the power structure who actually cares to do that.
So probably same old, same old.
Most people who create things do so because it gives them pleasure. And will continue to do so whether or not they get anything tangible in return.
Not to say they wouldn't be happy to get something in return, as well. But it's usually not the primary motivation.
http://www.asimovs.com/
Just because the good doctor is dead doesn't mean that the magazine is--and its stories consistently wins Hugos and Nebulas.
Locus is also probably worth mentioning.
http://www.locusmag.com/
It's probably the best respected magazine *about* science fiction. So it doesn't have any stories itself, but does print a lot of reviews.