There's hardly no real reason to own an Xbox. No other system has the systemlink or online capable games that the Xbox does. No other system features such a handy storage medium for its save games (the HD) which also adds a whole bunch of possibilities that are being used -- like in PGR2, being able to record your replays without even thinking about buynig a new memory card.
In addition to all live titles (Mech Assault, PGR2) and great driving titles (PGR2), the Xbox has a great deal of great Sega games. Toe Jam and Earl, Shenmue 2, Panzer Dragoon, Gunvalkyrie, etc. Best of all, the Xbox is very technically advanced. My copy of Fatal Frame for the Xbox doesn't suffer from the horrible slow loads that the PS2 version does, nor did my copy of Silent Hill 2.
It's also the only console that lets me DDR online.
The only time there's no reason to own a console is right at a console's lauch, because rarely are there are launch titles worth playing -- plus it usually takes a few months (or years, in the PS2's case) to get a good library of games to make it worth owning the system. There are plenty of system link, online, Sega, and other games on the Xbox that make it the (on of) the ones to have if you're serious about video gaming.
The flow of traffic is pretty neat. With "psychopathic tail-gaiting rigs, pickups, and SUVs" I just brake slam them until they go around. If they don't wish to drive properly behind me and give proper following distance (3 seconds), I don't want them behind me. If they haven't learned the lesson after 2 flashes + 1 really good slam (which usually has them swerving out of the way), I will stop the car until they pass me.
You don't have to play by their rules. Make your own up, as long as they match the posted speed limits (providing there aren't any extenuating circumstances). Keep your gates open, and you'll have about 4 choices of direction to go with your car should there be an emergency driving situation.
I would've switched to another insurance provider if they screwed you that way. You have that option, I don't. SGI's the only auto insurance company in my province.
As for speeding, I never mentioned it, although you being so defensive over it is funny. Perhaps if you had fewer speeding tickets, your insurance company would've been more reasonable;)
The right-hand text should all be indented left the same amount as the em width of the floating menu box. This is because (if the page is longer or you resize) the float menu is pinned, and will always remain in the same spot relative to the rest of the page. Most browsers get that wrong, too;)
I must say, the text looks pretty decent with the fonts Safari uses.
My v3.1.4 correctly doesn't let the floatbox overlap the right-hand side border, but yours miscalculates (probably related to the on-going margin bug in Konq that's still there 2 years after I noticed it) and has overlap that shouldn't be there.
The right-margin offset is misrendered, the font padding on the box is miscalulated (also a bug in Mozilla), and the tooltip for the mouse-over links is bugged (it has a very strange wrap column).
This is a lot better than the old KDE (which totally broke on the header box, among other problems), but it still needs fixing. Naturally, the only way to get fixes in is to either do it myself or get people to notice the bugs on/.;)
It's been 2 years since that KDE screenshot was taken, and the Konq I have on my KDE desktop (v3.1.4) renders the same -- incorrectly!
Having bugs fixed in beta versions is no excuse to not have the fix in the stable version. Far too often in OSS do programmers think it's ok to only maintain an unstable tree. Most people (especially the end users we want not using other software) won't run unstable software.
My stable Mozilla has rendered it correctly for years now. Konq's CSS is only surprisingly good if your nearest competitor is a bugfest like WinIE or Lynx.
"- unlike other browsers (mozilla, IE), it was designed using 'mature' technology (HTML4, CSS, etc.) and does not have nearly as many compatibility woes as IE, nor as many add-on hacks, as the other browsers had, due to changing stnadards over the years (in other words: it's a newer, fresher code base)"
Nope. Konq doesn't pass basic CSS tests that I have written. Mozilla does.
"- unlike mozilla/firebird, I can use it for hours/days with many pages open (15+) without the entire affair slowing to a crawl and/or dying"
Nope in my case. I'm not sure your problem, but I have no problem with my 2-3 windows with about 7-15 tabs each, open for the entirety my computer is on. The average between reboots on my workstation is a month. I'll close Mozilla to update to a more recent nightly, but that's about it. My hardware isn't insane either --- XP 1700+ w/ 768mb RAM.
SGI isn't, though. They're a crown corporation. Any profit is given back in the form of lower rates.
You can still make money on insurance without having everyone pay really large fees -- you do have the chance to earn interest on all the money you're holding in escrow, you just can't put it into anything very risky because of the regular payouts.
Protest, write some letters, mention the cool rates that SGI has for people in otherwise crappy brackets. There's a rate calculator if you click in (I get about 612$/year for my car). If I go by one of SGI's sample rate comparisons, I'd pay about $1,000 a year for a car that'd cost about $8,000 a year in Toronto for insurance. Yeesh!
This is also why I don't plan on moving to Alberta until sometime after I finish my degree;)
In my province, registering your car (= making legal to drive) is also insuring it. SGI is the one government body which does the car registration, auto insurance, and licencing for everything in the province.
There's no way you can drive your car without insurance, as everyone has it. If you do decide to drive an unregistered car, it's immediate jail time. The insurance is no fault; if there's an accident, you pay your deductible, and they cut a cheque for the rest. This also makes for the interesting situation where it may be cheaper to swerve into a pedestrian that it would be to let yourself be hit by a car that's out of control, because the no-fault stuff covers any liability in that case.
SGI's also pretty reasonable for an insurance company. I bike all summer, and some guy decided to open his door into me (despite my shouting and his looking back at me). I ended up being fine, but he managed to destroy everything in my pocket (GSM phone, Palm pilot, pen). I got a cheque for $400 after a week and 1 report to SGI.
I like insurance on something like a car. Nowhere else do you typically involve yourself with devices that can easily cause so much personal or property damage. Insurance means you have a small, controlled expense in the event of an accident. That's really the goal of insurance -- everyone pays a small amount so that those who need it aren't fucked. If I hit a 70,000$ BMW, I pay my deductible and walk away fine mostly fine: I will pay more for registration and have points on my licence if I'm at fault, but I won't have to sell everything I own and declare bankruptcy!
Yea, you can argue that you'd be better off sticking that money in a bank account and accumulating interest on it, but insurance is always there with no build up period, plus it requires no discipline on your part beside paying for it -- there's no temptation to run out and buy a new car or home theatre with the money. In that sense, insurance is already escrow.
Saying that auto insurance is an artificial industry is like saying that medical insurance is an artificial industry. The only people who say that are those who haven't yet used it, or incredibly naive people. Everyone wins with these kinds of social agreements -- go take an economics course, and you'll understand why:)
"How about insurance companies viewing the information to see how you drive to determine whether they should jack up your insurance rates."
I'm all for that, and so should you be. I drive obeying all posted signs and speed limits. Were it not for the fact that I live in a provice with socialized insurance on my car, I'd be paying about 3-4 grand per year to insure my car (worth about 1500$ CDN), rather than the 720$/year I pay now. Plus, since I have no accidents on record, I get a discount of 1% per each year of no accidents (6 years since I got my licence accident free).
The thing is, I'm a male in my low 20s. Most insurance companies traditionally track what they'd charge based on the age and gender, which (thanks to other drivers my gender and age being retards) would put me in a very shitty spot. Anything that lets insurance companies rape bad drivers while leaving better drivers with lowered rates and protection in case of stupid drivers is fine by me!
Going from VHS to DVD is one thing, you gain a lot of benefits (random access jumps, quality, etc), and all you have to buy is a player which costs about 50$ now, 100$ a couple of years ago, or 400$ the very day the DVD format came out.
HDTVs are about $2,000 for a cheap one. Consumers aren't going to buy a new kind of HDTV every 5-10 years. 480i lasted us 70 years, HDTV should at least go for 50 years -- there's no point buying an HDTV overwise, because you can save your money for another 5 years and just by $N+1. The only people buying would be the stupidly rich, of which there aren't enough to generate the volume that TV makers want.
The real HD TV resolutions are 480p, 720p, and 1080i. Those are fine for a lot of things, especially when you're making a high quality display that is 57" across (instead of a pithy 19", like your monitor) because higher resolutions cost exponentially more to make at that size.
Studios aren't shooting in 1080p -- they're shooting using film, which has no resolution. They can be transfered at practically any resolution you have space for and the imaging resolution to read at.
Before you start spouting off about what should and shouldn't be, develop an understanding of what you're trying to talk about on Slashdot. That way you won't seem like some nerd whose only movie experience is playing DVDs on his computer in his basement.
And Mobile Light Force 1 and 2 (aka Gunbird 1 and Shikigama no Shiro 2, finally ported to North America!).
And Ikaruga.
And Risk.
And Dance Dance Revolution.
Or Disgaea, that game was isometric top-down.
Or even Contra: Shattered Soldier!
Well, gee, it sure seems like the 3D consoles and PC still get a lot of 2D games! This is ignoring the huge amount of 2D games that come out on the GBA, naturally.
You can always go and find broken corner cases, but the vast majority of software is single threaded (or behaves that way), and in a testing situation will have normalized input. This leads to fairly regular errors. Obscure combinations of events don't usually happen with software that's mature, since it's been through many combinations and patched to follow them (IE: Apache won't die in a random fashion).
I've put in many hours of debugging software (my own and others), and all the crashes and other problems that are in software can be reproduced with a test case. The test case is always inputs which travel the path of broken logic. Since most of the computer is a controlled set of variables (IE: library versions won't change during a run, memory bits won't flip, etc), it's very easy to diagnose these -- and very hard for software to fail like you mention unless it's fairly complex. Most software isn't that complex (how complex is Knotes?).
A bad CRC on a really-big gzip file isn't a very granular test. A good way of stressing a system so that it will show you wether it fails reproducibly is to compile a couple different versions of the Linux kernel, and see it if fails in the same spot (or at all). If you ran memtest on it, it'd likely have shown an error. Whenever you aren't sure, run memtest:)
But highly unlikely. Plus, with the opensource software, you can always change the controlled variables to encourage the true problem to reveal itself.
Hardware fails in random patterns (bits flipped by beta radiation, for example), software fails the same way in controlled instances (the same flawed logic fails the same way each time).
So when you run a test 5 times, and you get 5 results, the hardware is broken. When you run the same test 5 times, and it gets to the exact same point before sig11ing, you have a software flaw.
This is also why you do multiple tests to ensure you're getting an accurate picture of what's going on (flawed or not).
Basically, the restrictions on carry-on beyond knives are silly, and even restricting a knife is somewhat silly because you can always make a substitute (however, if you think about just stopping random highjackings [non-premeditated], restricting knives is good).
Since the restrictions are stupid and time wasting, and the service (air travel) is fairly essential given how it's the only way to travel to and from some areas, entire planes of people who try to smuggle on nail clippers is the only way to get things changed. The governments involved won't change it, because they don't want to look bad to all the people who are deathly afraid of more terrorism. Only people can change it.
If the other people onboard those other planes had simply stood up to the highjackers, nothing bad would've really come from it. No one wanted to be a hero, so the highjackers were able to execute their suicide mission. At any point in the 2 years since, plenty more suicide missions could've gone off just fine -- there just haven't been any suicide missions to execute. The "security" is nothing but a smokescreen that needs to be taken away.
"After a year of mostly lackluster sales for the GameCube console (save a recent spurt following a recent price cut) and declining support from game developers, it looks as though Nintendo may have miscalculated."
AKA: "blah, blah, blah, THE END IS NEAR BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT SONY!"
Please. I've read this before. The fact is that Nintendo does like to stick to its tried-and-true, but the tried-and-true do rock.
We're also starting to see a lot more coolness in terms of software that targets the 'cube, rather than just garbage software. Maybe you don't remember having a PS2 -- but between its launch in 2000, and late 2002, there wasn't much for decent software (a handful of really good titles), and most of the first-gen stuff was just warmed over PS1 games with more textures. The same thing is true of the GameCube and Xbox -- the first year and a bit is usually pretty dire for decent games. Real innovation (like F-Zero GX being a true evolution of the game, and the upcoming RE4), as well as great remakes (RE1, Metal Gear Solid), as well as cool concepts (Animal Crossing, Pacman VS) are all great things which other consoles do not have. No serious gamer would be caught without a GameCube.
Then they go on to say stuff like, "The GameCube is teetering on the edge of whether they should stay in this business or not." Which is funny as all fuck because there are about 1.5 million more GameCubes out there than Xboxes. I suppose this means that Microsoft should pack its shit and go back to trying to kill Linus Torvalds -- because they obviously are total suck-asses at video game consoles. Strange, I haven't seen a Washington Post article about that!
North American reporters have this queer fascination with kicking someone when they're down. This is just another example of it.
GameCube has all the stuff that Sony and Microsoft don't. There is a huge amount of overlap in the PS2 and Xbox library, but very little in GameCube land. As I said before, no serious gamer would be without a GameCube.
If the worth of the house is more than the cost of the mortage, it's not really a debt. You could easily turn around and sell the house, pay off the mortgage, and have some money to boot.
Rent is debt, it's a continuing eternal debt. Owning a house is owning something that's worth something, even if you have to pay a very large amount of money for it.
"I wish women's perversion wouldn't be the deciding factor in videogame character design."
Women are about over 50% of the public, and getting their gaming dollars on top of your gaming dollars is a pretty good slam dunk for most companies (if they can pull it off). Think how many more copies of FFX-2 have sold because of the fact that women and men can enjoy it just as easily. SquareEnix has been getting a lot more gaming gold from the femmegamers recently, thanks to most RPGs easy-to-enjoy gameplay.
Right now, some woman is thinking: "I wish men's perversion wouldn't be the deciding factor in videogame character design." Take one look at Ivy in Soul Calibur if you don't understand what I mean;)
"it pleases me to run games like Dungeon Siege, Postal 2, Warcraft 3, and a whole host of others that don't have native Linux versions (don't mention Wine, please). "
Don't mention Wine, and don't mention Windows. Do you know how many worms my GBA has had? The same number as my Xbox, SNES, GameCube, PS2, TG16, and every other game console. Plus, I don't have to spend 500$ on a video card every year so I can play 2 new games (while breaking 2 old games)!
Slashdot Mirror
There's hardly no real reason to own an Xbox. No other system has the systemlink or online capable games that the Xbox does. No other system features such a handy storage medium for its save games (the HD) which also adds a whole bunch of possibilities that are being used -- like in PGR2, being able to record your replays without even thinking about buynig a new memory card.
In addition to all live titles (Mech Assault, PGR2) and great driving titles (PGR2), the Xbox has a great deal of great Sega games. Toe Jam and Earl, Shenmue 2, Panzer Dragoon, Gunvalkyrie, etc. Best of all, the Xbox is very technically advanced. My copy of Fatal Frame for the Xbox doesn't suffer from the horrible slow loads that the PS2 version does, nor did my copy of Silent Hill 2.
It's also the only console that lets me DDR online.
The only time there's no reason to own a console is right at a console's lauch, because rarely are there are launch titles worth playing -- plus it usually takes a few months (or years, in the PS2's case) to get a good library of games to make it worth owning the system. There are plenty of system link, online, Sega, and other games on the Xbox that make it the (on of) the ones to have if you're serious about video gaming.
The flow of traffic is pretty neat. With "psychopathic tail-gaiting rigs, pickups, and SUVs" I just brake slam them until they go around. If they don't wish to drive properly behind me and give proper following distance (3 seconds), I don't want them behind me. If they haven't learned the lesson after 2 flashes + 1 really good slam (which usually has them swerving out of the way), I will stop the car until they pass me.
You don't have to play by their rules. Make your own up, as long as they match the posted speed limits (providing there aren't any extenuating circumstances). Keep your gates open, and you'll have about 4 choices of direction to go with your car should there be an emergency driving situation.
SGI's not bad, they're just not great.
;)
I would've switched to another insurance provider if they screwed you that way. You have that option, I don't. SGI's the only auto insurance company in my province.
As for speeding, I never mentioned it, although you being so defensive over it is funny. Perhaps if you had fewer speeding tickets, your insurance company would've been more reasonable
The right-hand text should all be indented left the same amount as the em width of the floating menu box. This is because (if the page is longer or you resize) the float menu is pinned, and will always remain in the same spot relative to the rest of the page. Most browsers get that wrong, too ;)
I must say, the text looks pretty decent with the fonts Safari uses.
I'm not sure when the bug became added. 2003122707 has it as well. Might be time for another visit to Bugzilla :)
My v3.1.4 correctly doesn't let the floatbox overlap the right-hand side border, but yours miscalculates (probably related to the on-going margin bug in Konq that's still there 2 years after I noticed it) and has overlap that shouldn't be there.
:-/
A disapointing regression
The right-margin offset is misrendered, the font padding on the box is miscalulated (also a bug in Mozilla), and the tooltip for the mouse-over links is bugged (it has a very strange wrap column).
/. ;)
This is a lot better than the old KDE (which totally broke on the header box, among other problems), but it still needs fixing. Naturally, the only way to get fixes in is to either do it myself or get people to notice the bugs on
It's been 2 years since that KDE screenshot was taken, and the Konq I have on my KDE desktop (v3.1.4) renders the same -- incorrectly!
Having bugs fixed in beta versions is no excuse to not have the fix in the stable version. Far too often in OSS do programmers think it's ok to only maintain an unstable tree. Most people (especially the end users we want not using other software) won't run unstable software.
My stable Mozilla has rendered it correctly for years now. Konq's CSS is only surprisingly good if your nearest competitor is a bugfest like WinIE or Lynx.
"- it was designed from the ground up and is conceptually sound, unlike mozilla which was a hack job on top of netscape's browser"
Nope. They dropped the old code and started from scratch a long, looong time ago.
"- unlike other browsers (mozilla, IE), it was designed using 'mature' technology (HTML4, CSS, etc.) and does not have nearly as many compatibility woes as IE, nor as many add-on hacks, as the other browsers had, due to changing stnadards over the years (in other words: it's a newer, fresher code base)"
Nope. Konq doesn't pass basic CSS tests that I have written. Mozilla does.
"- unlike mozilla/firebird, I can use it for hours/days with many pages open (15+) without the entire affair slowing to a crawl and/or dying"
Nope in my case. I'm not sure your problem, but I have no problem with my 2-3 windows with about 7-15 tabs each, open for the entirety my computer is on. The average between reboots on my workstation is a month. I'll close Mozilla to update to a more recent nightly, but that's about it. My hardware isn't insane either --- XP 1700+ w/ 768mb RAM.
SGI isn't, though. They're a crown corporation. Any profit is given back in the form of lower rates.
You can still make money on insurance without having everyone pay really large fees -- you do have the chance to earn interest on all the money you're holding in escrow, you just can't put it into anything very risky because of the regular payouts.
Protest, write some letters, mention the cool rates that
;)
SGI has for people in otherwise crappy brackets. There's a rate calculator if you click in (I get about 612$/year for my car). If I go by one of SGI's sample rate comparisons, I'd pay about $1,000 a year for a car that'd cost about $8,000 a year in Toronto for insurance. Yeesh!
This is also why I don't plan on moving to Alberta until sometime after I finish my degree
In my province, registering your car (= making legal to drive) is also insuring it. SGI is the one government body which does the car registration, auto insurance, and licencing for everything in the province.
:)
There's no way you can drive your car without insurance, as everyone has it. If you do decide to drive an unregistered car, it's immediate jail time. The insurance is no fault; if there's an accident, you pay your deductible, and they cut a cheque for the rest. This also makes for the interesting situation where it may be cheaper to swerve into a pedestrian that it would be to let yourself be hit by a car that's out of control, because the no-fault stuff covers any liability in that case.
SGI's also pretty reasonable for an insurance company. I bike all summer, and some guy decided to open his door into me (despite my shouting and his looking back at me). I ended up being fine, but he managed to destroy everything in my pocket (GSM phone, Palm pilot, pen). I got a cheque for $400 after a week and 1 report to SGI.
I like insurance on something like a car. Nowhere else do you typically involve yourself with devices that can easily cause so much personal or property damage. Insurance means you have a small, controlled expense in the event of an accident. That's really the goal of insurance -- everyone pays a small amount so that those who need it aren't fucked. If I hit a 70,000$ BMW, I pay my deductible and walk away fine mostly fine: I will pay more for registration and have points on my licence if I'm at fault, but I won't have to sell everything I own and declare bankruptcy!
Yea, you can argue that you'd be better off sticking that money in a bank account and accumulating interest on it, but insurance is always there with no build up period, plus it requires no discipline on your part beside paying for it -- there's no temptation to run out and buy a new car or home theatre with the money. In that sense, insurance is already escrow.
Saying that auto insurance is an artificial industry is like saying that medical insurance is an artificial industry. The only people who say that are those who haven't yet used it, or incredibly naive people. Everyone wins with these kinds of social agreements -- go take an economics course, and you'll understand why
"How about insurance companies viewing the information to see how you drive to determine whether they should jack up your insurance rates."
I'm all for that, and so should you be. I drive obeying all posted signs and speed limits. Were it not for the fact that I live in a provice with socialized insurance on my car, I'd be paying about 3-4 grand per year to insure my car (worth about 1500$ CDN), rather than the 720$/year I pay now. Plus, since I have no accidents on record, I get a discount of 1% per each year of no accidents (6 years since I got my licence accident free).
The thing is, I'm a male in my low 20s. Most insurance companies traditionally track what they'd charge based on the age and gender, which (thanks to other drivers my gender and age being retards) would put me in a very shitty spot. Anything that lets insurance companies rape bad drivers while leaving better drivers with lowered rates and protection in case of stupid drivers is fine by me!
Going from VHS to DVD is one thing, you gain a lot of benefits (random access jumps, quality, etc), and all you have to buy is a player which costs about 50$ now, 100$ a couple of years ago, or 400$ the very day the DVD format came out.
HDTVs are about $2,000 for a cheap one. Consumers aren't going to buy a new kind of HDTV every 5-10 years. 480i lasted us 70 years, HDTV should at least go for 50 years -- there's no point buying an HDTV overwise, because you can save your money for another 5 years and just by $N+1. The only people buying would be the stupidly rich, of which there aren't enough to generate the volume that TV makers want.
The real HD TV resolutions are 480p, 720p, and 1080i. Those are fine for a lot of things, especially when you're making a high quality display that is 57" across (instead of a pithy 19", like your monitor) because higher resolutions cost exponentially more to make at that size.
Studios aren't shooting in 1080p -- they're shooting using film, which has no resolution. They can be transfered at practically any resolution you have space for and the imaging resolution to read at.
Before you start spouting off about what should and shouldn't be, develop an understanding of what you're trying to talk about on Slashdot. That way you won't seem like some nerd whose only movie experience is playing DVDs on his computer in his basement.
There was that Viewtiful Joe game.
And that Megaman Network Transmission game.
And that Guilty Gear XX game.
And that Half-Life 2D game.
And Galactic Civilizations.
And Mobile Light Force 1 and 2 (aka Gunbird 1 and Shikigama no Shiro 2, finally ported to North America!).
And Ikaruga.
And Risk.
And Dance Dance Revolution.
Or Disgaea, that game was isometric top-down.
Or even Contra: Shattered Soldier!
Well, gee, it sure seems like the 3D consoles and PC still get a lot of 2D games! This is ignoring the huge amount of 2D games that come out on the GBA, naturally.
"most of the researchers believe the scabs are too old to be dangerous, and they fear they may not even be able to yield live smallpox."
;(
Damn! No virus we spent the last century trying to erradicate -- I've pissed myself in fear over the end of this menace
You can always go and find broken corner cases, but the vast majority of software is single threaded (or behaves that way), and in a testing situation will have normalized input. This leads to fairly regular errors. Obscure combinations of events don't usually happen with software that's mature, since it's been through many combinations and patched to follow them (IE: Apache won't die in a random fashion).
I've put in many hours of debugging software (my own and others), and all the crashes and other problems that are in software can be reproduced with a test case. The test case is always inputs which travel the path of broken logic. Since most of the computer is a controlled set of variables (IE: library versions won't change during a run, memory bits won't flip, etc), it's very easy to diagnose these -- and very hard for software to fail like you mention unless it's fairly complex. Most software isn't that complex (how complex is Knotes?).
A bad CRC on a really-big gzip file isn't a very granular test. A good way of stressing a system so that it will show you wether it fails reproducibly is to compile a couple different versions of the Linux kernel, and see it if fails in the same spot (or at all). If you ran memtest on it, it'd likely have shown an error. Whenever you aren't sure, run memtest :)
But highly unlikely. Plus, with the opensource software, you can always change the controlled variables to encourage the true problem to reveal itself.
Hardware fails in random patterns (bits flipped by beta radiation, for example), software fails the same way in controlled instances (the same flawed logic fails the same way each time).
So when you run a test 5 times, and you get 5 results, the hardware is broken. When you run the same test 5 times, and it gets to the exact same point before sig11ing, you have a software flaw.
This is also why you do multiple tests to ensure you're getting an accurate picture of what's going on (flawed or not).
Basically, the restrictions on carry-on beyond knives are silly, and even restricting a knife is somewhat silly because you can always make a substitute (however, if you think about just stopping random highjackings [non-premeditated], restricting knives is good).
Since the restrictions are stupid and time wasting, and the service (air travel) is fairly essential given how it's the only way to travel to and from some areas, entire planes of people who try to smuggle on nail clippers is the only way to get things changed. The governments involved won't change it, because they don't want to look bad to all the people who are deathly afraid of more terrorism. Only people can change it.
If the other people onboard those other planes had simply stood up to the highjackers, nothing bad would've really come from it. No one wanted to be a hero, so the highjackers were able to execute their suicide mission. At any point in the 2 years since, plenty more suicide missions could've gone off just fine -- there just haven't been any suicide missions to execute. The "security" is nothing but a smokescreen that needs to be taken away.
"After a year of mostly lackluster sales for the GameCube console (save a recent spurt following a recent price cut) and declining support from game developers, it looks as though Nintendo may have miscalculated."
AKA: "blah, blah, blah, THE END IS NEAR BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT SONY!"
Please. I've read this before. The fact is that Nintendo does like to stick to its tried-and-true, but the tried-and-true do rock.
We're also starting to see a lot more coolness in terms of software that targets the 'cube, rather than just garbage software. Maybe you don't remember having a PS2 -- but between its launch in 2000, and late 2002, there wasn't much for decent software (a handful of really good titles), and most of the first-gen stuff was just warmed over PS1 games with more textures. The same thing is true of the GameCube and Xbox -- the first year and a bit is usually pretty dire for decent games. Real innovation (like F-Zero GX being a true evolution of the game, and the upcoming RE4), as well as great remakes (RE1, Metal Gear Solid), as well as cool concepts (Animal Crossing, Pacman VS) are all great things which other consoles do not have. No serious gamer would be caught without a GameCube.
Then they go on to say stuff like, "The GameCube is teetering on the edge of whether they should stay in this business or not." Which is funny as all fuck because there are about 1.5 million more GameCubes out there than Xboxes. I suppose this means that Microsoft should pack its shit and go back to trying to kill Linus Torvalds -- because they obviously are total suck-asses at video game consoles. Strange, I haven't seen a Washington Post article about that!
North American reporters have this queer fascination with kicking someone when they're down. This is just another example of it.
GameCube has all the stuff that Sony and Microsoft don't. There is a huge amount of overlap in the PS2 and Xbox library, but very little in GameCube land. As I said before, no serious gamer would be without a GameCube.
If the worth of the house is more than the cost of the mortage, it's not really a debt. You could easily turn around and sell the house, pay off the mortgage, and have some money to boot.
Rent is debt, it's a continuing eternal debt. Owning a house is owning something that's worth something, even if you have to pay a very large amount of money for it.
"I wish women's perversion wouldn't be the deciding factor in videogame character design."
;)
Women are about over 50% of the public, and getting their gaming dollars on top of your gaming dollars is a pretty good slam dunk for most companies (if they can pull it off). Think how many more copies of FFX-2 have sold because of the fact that women and men can enjoy it just as easily. SquareEnix has been getting a lot more gaming gold from the femmegamers recently, thanks to most RPGs easy-to-enjoy gameplay.
Right now, some woman is thinking: "I wish men's perversion wouldn't be the deciding factor in videogame character design." Take one look at Ivy in Soul Calibur if you don't understand what I mean
"it pleases me to run games like Dungeon Siege, Postal 2, Warcraft 3, and a whole host of others that don't have native Linux versions (don't mention Wine, please). "
Don't mention Wine, and don't mention Windows. Do you know how many worms my GBA has had? The same number as my Xbox, SNES, GameCube, PS2, TG16, and every other game console. Plus, I don't have to spend 500$ on a video card every year so I can play 2 new games (while breaking 2 old games)!