What I don't understand is why they would have such a grudge against used games, or worse, used and OLD unsupported games. I guess it's a case of "If we can't have any money from that transaction, then neither will you."
Competition. If you are busy playing a fan-translated Secret of Mana 2, you won't be in the shop buying Generic RPG 3. People only have so much money to use on entertainment, and even if the old game was free, only so many hours in their day, and competition risks lowering Nintendo's profits.
Remember, corporations hate free markets and competition. Getting rid of them is almost always the motivator for seemingly senseless corporate behavior. Of course it is wrong to try to stop people from selling their old games, but the whole idea of a corporation is to allow for individual profits without individual responsibility, so it gets done anyway.
Don't disparage something you don't understand. It's like saying you hate all music cause you heard a few Britney Spears songs.
No, it is like saying you don't want a radio without an "off" button.
Most Net Flash content is crap. It's mainly used for ads. I, for one, surf with FlashBlock and only allow the damn thing to play when absolutely neccessary.
Eugeneticists may use this information to claim the superiority of Europeans, a counterpoint can be made that these people can't be superior because were having sex with sub-humans.
Were Neanderthals sub-human ? From what I've understood, they had about equal culture to modern-type humans of the time (buried their dead, made tools, had some beginnings of religion), and may have died off simply because modern humans can aim better when throwing (helped them hunt more efficiently). Besides, if we indeed carry their genes, then they weren't a separate species, since they were obviously capable of producing fertile offspring with modern-type humans; in fact one could ask if they died off at all, since they still have living descendants - us. And I've certainly seen uglier people than the Neanderthal reconstructions, so even that can't be used as basis for such claims;).
So, anyway, do you have any reason to call them sub-humans besides them being in Europe before us ?
As for eugenetics, it is rubbish, simply because you can't possibly know what the conditions are going to be in a few centuries, so you can't know what traits help people survive then. For example, the ability to collect and store huge amounts of energy as body fat was very beneficial through most of human history, but turned into a hindrance as soon as industrialization brought abundance.
I think Java was an accessible OO lanugage for people who were scared of C and therefore C++. These days, C++ has so many great toolkits that it's (relatively) easy to write desktop apps in,
And they crash randomly and let random people run arbitrary code in your machine whenever they encounter any unexpected data in the Internet.
I'm sure that manual memory management was a good idea when C was young, hardware was slow, applications were small and the people who used them could be expected to be non-hostile. None of these things are true anymore, so could we please get rid of C and it's lack of bounds checking ? That alone is a sufficient reason to write everything that touches the Internet with Java: they might crash with NullPointerException, but they will not let a malformed HTML page insert arbitrary code to my main memory. And even NullPointerExceptions can be caught and dealt with, unlike segfaults (which are really only useful for writing error logs before exiting).
People scared of C and C++ have a good reason. They are not good or safe languages, and they never will be, no matter how many toolkits you slap on top of them. Please switch to something with memory management and mandatory range checking, especially for Internet-enabled applications. Please.
The problem with Java on Linux isn't just the license, it's technological: poor platform integration, slow GUI, etc. Java applications feel foreign and violate HIGs on Linux and on other platforms. And neither Sun nor SWT have been able to fix that.
Nah. The real problem is swapping: once you hit swap, garbage collection will cause a swapstorm, since the application will read through it's entire memory space.
Linux has no GUI standards to speak of, and most Java programs are pretty easy to use anyway, so that is no problem.
Of course, the 3D interfaces are difficult to play. But maybe I'm must too used to having the full dumgeon map laid out in small, succinct characters for maximum information. Falcon's Eye, while nice looking, was unplayable, IMO.
The problem with normal text mode is that you can't tell a ghost (" ") form a darkened portion of the room (also " ") without specifically looking around. Realistic, perhaps, but also annoying.
I once, long ago, when i still used DOS, found a program that replaced the font with special symbols. It wasn't exactly graphical, but it was just enough to turn the game from ascetic to comfortable. Ah, the hours I spent chasing after succubi...
I'd say that Verizon is acting to protect their shareholder's interests, which is precisely what they should do. They have no obligation to do business with pedophiles, and just the PR impact alone could make it far too expensive to take their money.
Refusing to carry packets from pedophiles means that Verizon is no longer a common carrier. It picks and chooses the packets it carries, and thus is responsible for whatever illegal content gets through the filter. In other words, from now on everytime Joe Public downloads an mp3 over Verizon network, the RIAA gets to sue Verizon. Everytime Joe Pervert downloads kiddy porn, the Verizon execs are hauled to prison. And so on.
Or that's how it shoul go. Verizon, being a large corporation, is not likely going to actually be held accountable to the laws. It has too much money to bribe the authority with.
Long and short: business decision, and a correct one.
Perhaps. And a business decision with consequences for free speech in another country. Which rises the question: when a corporation wields power that rivals a government, shouldn't it be held to the same standards - First Amendment in this case ?
Verizon is not a private enterprise in any meaningful way. It has more shareholders than some nations have citizens. As this matter proves, it holds power to silence entire web forums not owned by it. It is, for all intents an purposes, a nation-equivalent entity. It should be treated as one.
Any sufficiently powerful organization is indistinguishable from a government. They should be treated accordingly, and held to the same standards as governments. Currently, we allow much too much leeway for international corporations - they have a right to do anything to benefit themselves, and any attempt to get them to behave is decried as limiting the freedom of markets. I say it's about time to put an end to this insanity.
That's not always true. There are always some evolutionary dead ends that end up just dying out.
Of course, but the premise here was a situation where species A spawned two new species, and was thus not a dead end. Besides, ants are apparently an evolutionary dead end - they are at a local optimum - but are doing very well.
Even if it does, it may not be enforceable, as someone here already pointed out -- Freenet comes to mind.
Freenet does not help here. Freenet is not capable of hiding the fact that you're running Freenet from your ISP. Therefore, running Freenet would make you an immediate suspect. In fact, since the whole purpose of Freenet is publishing and viewing information anonymously, and your node is likely to route queries and inserts from other people, running Freenet would almost certainly make you guilty of aiding criminals in their crimes.
Well, your post is propably a troll, but I'll answer anyway:
No it will not bring back the dead, but it WILL do 2 things:
Um, you listed 5 (five) things.
declare once and for all, and for everyone to see that killing is not allowed, which is a good thing
Yeah, nothing like a public execution to drive home the point that killing is WRONG !!!
prevent him from doing any further damage, which is a good thing
How much damage is a deposed dictator capable of doing ?
-> bring this criminal's death during a last display of public humiliation, where everybody is reminded that he was a murderer, which is a VERY good thing
-> kill this animal just as he killed his thousands of victims, which is a good thing
No, revenge is bad. But this is not revenge.
Of course not. How could anyone possibly make such a mistake after reading your comments:).
No, revenge is bad. But this is not revenge. This is a public, and final statement that nobody gets to kill.
Except the government. Which Saddam was when he committed his crimes.
I know as well as anyone that we don't get the truth but this guy deserves to die 148 times over.
Oh, Saddam deserves to die all right. However, judging him in an obviously unfair trial and then killing him sends a message: "It's okay to kill your enemies without a fair trial". On the other hand, simply imprisoning him for life would send the message: "See, this is how civilized people behave - we treat even our enemies well and value even their lives".
Whenever you can, keep the moral high ground. It will win you respect, gives you an example to point to to try to shame your enemies into behaving, and means that you don't get as much of a negative reaction when you can't stick to it for whatever reason since people will know that you did your best and it just wasn't enough in that case. And, of course, it will make the world a nicer place to everyone.
Seeing your enemies hanging by their neck until dead is undoubtedly pleasant, but only fools subject reason for revenge, and such fools should never be let anywhere near power.
No. There is species A, which has babies which are species B and species C. Species A dies out, and two separate species are left.
Actually what happens is that the population of species A gets split into two separated populations for whatever reason, and over time the populations evolve in different ways, until they are different enough to be considered different species.
A doesn't die out; A becomes B (and C) in the same way than a child becomes adult. The whole concept of species is somewhat misleading when talking about evolution, since populations change over time and smoothly slide from one species to another. For example, there are no more australopithecus's around, but they didn't die out; they just evolved into us (could be wrong here, human evolutionary tree isn't my speciality).
Yes, we've had one attack in the last 5 years, but I think the important thing is that they (bin laden, al qeada, etc) said they would bring down the WTC and did.
If I went to harbor and everytime a ship left it would say "that ship will sink", and one of them eventually would, would that make me a prophet ?
After at least one failed attempt WTC indeed fell. From what I've understood, it was a surprise to Bin Laden as well - he had only attempted to cause a fire and structural damage. In other words he got lucky. That does not make him a copetent leader.
So now they say they want to kill 10 million Americans (biological, nuclear, whatever). You just think they're talking out their butts? If they say it, they mean it, and believe they can do it.
If I say I'll kill you, and I'll shoot you dead, and next say that I'll kill 10 million people, does that make me capable of doing so ?
And they don't suck at war, they're mopping the floor with us in Iraq, achieving every one of their goals: death of infidels and the breeding of hatred for the west. Anti-American sentiment has to be at or near an all-time high, which is exactly what they want.
All of which is Bushs fault, not Ladens. That Ladens enemy happens to be an idiot doesn't make him a genius.
If you haven't seen "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West", we can't continue this discussion.
Why ? Are there some facts there that you can't find anywhere else ? You realize, of course, that this would make said facts unverifiable, and therefore suspect ?
But it's pretty ironic that you were apparently indoctrinated by a documentary describing indoctrination:).
You make some good points, however, you give the impression that "dying for your country" is a nobility exclusive to Muslim thought. Our volunteer military is built on the tradition of self sacrifice - the soldier's idea that his potential death can serve the greater good.
The suicide bombers aren't dying for their country or for the greater good. They are killing themselves because they believe that doing so will get them a reward in the afterlife. The act of dying while to take infidels with them is what's important to them, not the consequences of the act.
You make a distinction between our cultures that does not exist.
No. He's making a distinction between members of a cult - which most terrorist organizations can be justly called - preaching suicide and murder and soldiers. It's not a cultural difference, for there are evil people and morons who follow them anywhere; it's a difference between roles.
The arguements "You're still dead" means nothing. Thats a horrible point to put across, because you are saying that no lessons can be learnt from murders. They can, and clearly they are being learnt.
And you're still dead.
What theory do you put forward, why would we be putting cameras up if they didn't help catch criminals?
Presumably to better monitor law-abiding citizens and keep them under control.
Apparently, you sciency guys forgot the fact that autumn is over in 6 more weeks. Us non-sciency guys call that "reading the calendar":)
Apparently, you non-sciency guys forgot that the coldest month is usually February, which is about three months (this month, December and January) away. Since February is coldest, the climate will keep on getting colder until then. We sciency guys call this "reading the thermometer":).
The reason is simply that ground and water store warmth and therefore cool (and warm) slowly; consequently, they are warmer right now than they would be in thermodynamic equilibrium (that is, they are warmer than they should be based on just how much warmth they get from the Sun), and will keep on getting colder even after the energy flow starts increasing again after winter solstice. The equilibrium is not reached until around February; until then, the cold trend will continue.
It's the same reason why the warmest summer weathers only come after summer solstice.
If the good professor is right and we're arriving at some kind of point of no return then again nature will do what nature does: eliminate the problem and restore balance.
Nature has no balance. It is a dynamic system where some states persist for a while, but eventually they will always change into something else. This whole idea about "balance" in nature is nonsense and meaningless besides: just what does it mean that nature is in "balance" ? What is balanced against what ? Why is that particular state somehow more "balanced" than some other state ?
Continents move, mountains rise and get reduced back down, seas are born and dry up, glaciers extend and contract, forests grow and burn down, lakes turn into swamps and dry up again, species come and go... And that's ignoring things like asteroid impacts, changes in Sun's activity, Earth's magnetic field reversals, possible nearby supernovas, volcanic eruptions etc. Face it: nature is not resting in some tranquil balance that only gets disturbed by the eeevil human beings. It's never still.
*Life* will go on on this planet... just not humans.
As tool-using intelligent omnivores human beings are amongst the most adaptable species on the planet, and thus amongst the most likely survivors for any such situations. Having a population that's spread accross the whole globe doesn't hurt either.
These doomsday scenarios are really pretty ridiculous. Humans survived in the burned-out rubble piles most European cities were reduced to in WW2, they aren't going to go extinct because tuna runs out.
Are there rights that are yours simply by virtue of being a human being? Or are governments the ultimate decider of what set of rights you have?
Whoever can take away a particular right of yours is the ultimate arbiter of whether you have it or not. That someone is usually the government, since it is the strongest entity around. So yeah, the governments are the ultimate decider of what set of rights they bother honoring, and the rest are just fancy philosophical concepts which have nothing to do with your life.
Might does not make right, but neither does right make might.
She's retired, disabled, and has nothing to do all day but play on the computer so I don't push the point anymore. I just accept the fact that every month or so I have to visit her and fix her computer. It's really a drag on my life since I have a family of my own to worry about and frankly couldn't give a shit whether her computer works or not.
So stop fixing the damn thing. Why on Earth would you "have to" keep on fixing it ? Are you codependent or something ?
Besides, it sounds to me like she's just using it as an excuse to get your attention. If I'm right, then she'll just switches to some other method if the computer problem ever gets solved for good.
Hunter Safety, Driver Safety, and the proposed Surfer Safety are not supposed to provide you with 100% security.
Hunter Safety and Driver Safety are supposed to keep you from killing yourself or anyone else. Surfer Safety is supposed to keep your computer from being hijacked. Please don't try to make it sound comparable to the former two.
6. The 32-bit Era (PS1, N64) - At least twice as good as the 16-bit era.
I have to disagree here. PS1 and N64 marked the transfer from 2D into 3D graphics. While this works for some game types - RPGs and others which don't require accurate controls or good situation awareness - it killed platformers. You just can't get the same level of control and situation awareness in 3D than you can get in 2D.
3D games also take much more resources to develop than 2D ones, since there still aren't any good 3D modellers - and with "good" I mean "learning curve is flatter than himalaya" - and especially not ones that would make content suitable for real-time game engines where the minimum polygon count is a must. They usually look worse too, especially if you compare games running in the same resolution.
So no, 32-bit era is not "twice as good as 16-bit era". It is the era where many of the problems of current games (spiraling development costs) originate. It has some good games - Final Fantasy 7, Chrono Cross - but they sure as Hell aren't twice as good as their predecessors (FF6 and Chrono Trigger).
Oddly enough, memory size has now really outgrown what I manage to use up. Even with some huge memory drains, 2GB is more than enough memory.
Hmm... I have a gig of memory, and 5 gigs of swap, and have often hit 3 gig swap use mark just in my normal desktop use. Of course I also have 12 virtual desktops configured right now:)...
In any case, 768 MB might seem like a lot of memory, but it isn't really. Textures are 2D images, and when you double the resolution, you quadruple memory consumption. And, of course, more complex scenes require more textures, not just higher resolution ones. Then there's bumbmapping and such things, all of which require their own textures.
Graphics take memory. A lot of it. 768 MB is going to be too little eventually.
Slashdot Mirror
Competition. If you are busy playing a fan-translated Secret of Mana 2, you won't be in the shop buying Generic RPG 3. People only have so much money to use on entertainment, and even if the old game was free, only so many hours in their day, and competition risks lowering Nintendo's profits.
Remember, corporations hate free markets and competition. Getting rid of them is almost always the motivator for seemingly senseless corporate behavior. Of course it is wrong to try to stop people from selling their old games, but the whole idea of a corporation is to allow for individual profits without individual responsibility, so it gets done anyway.
No, it is like saying you don't want a radio without an "off" button.
Most Net Flash content is crap. It's mainly used for ads. I, for one, surf with FlashBlock and only allow the damn thing to play when absolutely neccessary.
Were Neanderthals sub-human ? From what I've understood, they had about equal culture to modern-type humans of the time (buried their dead, made tools, had some beginnings of religion), and may have died off simply because modern humans can aim better when throwing (helped them hunt more efficiently). Besides, if we indeed carry their genes, then they weren't a separate species, since they were obviously capable of producing fertile offspring with modern-type humans; in fact one could ask if they died off at all, since they still have living descendants - us. And I've certainly seen uglier people than the Neanderthal reconstructions, so even that can't be used as basis for such claims ;).
So, anyway, do you have any reason to call them sub-humans besides them being in Europe before us ?
As for eugenetics, it is rubbish, simply because you can't possibly know what the conditions are going to be in a few centuries, so you can't know what traits help people survive then. For example, the ability to collect and store huge amounts of energy as body fat was very beneficial through most of human history, but turned into a hindrance as soon as industrialization brought abundance.
And they crash randomly and let random people run arbitrary code in your machine whenever they encounter any unexpected data in the Internet.
I'm sure that manual memory management was a good idea when C was young, hardware was slow, applications were small and the people who used them could be expected to be non-hostile. None of these things are true anymore, so could we please get rid of C and it's lack of bounds checking ? That alone is a sufficient reason to write everything that touches the Internet with Java: they might crash with NullPointerException, but they will not let a malformed HTML page insert arbitrary code to my main memory. And even NullPointerExceptions can be caught and dealt with, unlike segfaults (which are really only useful for writing error logs before exiting).
People scared of C and C++ have a good reason. They are not good or safe languages, and they never will be, no matter how many toolkits you slap on top of them. Please switch to something with memory management and mandatory range checking, especially for Internet-enabled applications. Please.
Nah. The real problem is swapping: once you hit swap, garbage collection will cause a swapstorm, since the application will read through it's entire memory space.
Linux has no GUI standards to speak of, and most Java programs are pretty easy to use anyway, so that is no problem.
The problem with normal text mode is that you can't tell a ghost (" ") form a darkened portion of the room (also " ") without specifically looking around. Realistic, perhaps, but also annoying.
I once, long ago, when i still used DOS, found a program that replaced the font with special symbols. It wasn't exactly graphical, but it was just enough to turn the game from ascetic to comfortable. Ah, the hours I spent chasing after succubi...
Er, I mean :|...
Refusing to carry packets from pedophiles means that Verizon is no longer a common carrier. It picks and chooses the packets it carries, and thus is responsible for whatever illegal content gets through the filter. In other words, from now on everytime Joe Public downloads an mp3 over Verizon network, the RIAA gets to sue Verizon. Everytime Joe Pervert downloads kiddy porn, the Verizon execs are hauled to prison. And so on.
Or that's how it shoul go. Verizon, being a large corporation, is not likely going to actually be held accountable to the laws. It has too much money to bribe the authority with.
Perhaps. And a business decision with consequences for free speech in another country. Which rises the question: when a corporation wields power that rivals a government, shouldn't it be held to the same standards - First Amendment in this case ?
Verizon is not a private enterprise in any meaningful way. It has more shareholders than some nations have citizens. As this matter proves, it holds power to silence entire web forums not owned by it. It is, for all intents an purposes, a nation-equivalent entity. It should be treated as one.
Any sufficiently powerful organization is indistinguishable from a government. They should be treated accordingly, and held to the same standards as governments. Currently, we allow much too much leeway for international corporations - they have a right to do anything to benefit themselves, and any attempt to get them to behave is decried as limiting the freedom of markets. I say it's about time to put an end to this insanity.
Of course, but the premise here was a situation where species A spawned two new species, and was thus not a dead end. Besides, ants are apparently an evolutionary dead end - they are at a local optimum - but are doing very well.
Freenet does not help here. Freenet is not capable of hiding the fact that you're running Freenet from your ISP. Therefore, running Freenet would make you an immediate suspect. In fact, since the whole purpose of Freenet is publishing and viewing information anonymously, and your node is likely to route queries and inserts from other people, running Freenet would almost certainly make you guilty of aiding criminals in their crimes.
Few people like being made fun of.
Well, your post is propably a troll, but I'll answer anyway:
Um, you listed 5 (five) things.
Yeah, nothing like a public execution to drive home the point that killing is WRONG !!!
How much damage is a deposed dictator capable of doing ?
Of course not. How could anyone possibly make such a mistake after reading your comments :).
Except the government. Which Saddam was when he committed his crimes.
Oh, Saddam deserves to die all right. However, judging him in an obviously unfair trial and then killing him sends a message: "It's okay to kill your enemies without a fair trial". On the other hand, simply imprisoning him for life would send the message: "See, this is how civilized people behave - we treat even our enemies well and value even their lives".
Whenever you can, keep the moral high ground. It will win you respect, gives you an example to point to to try to shame your enemies into behaving, and means that you don't get as much of a negative reaction when you can't stick to it for whatever reason since people will know that you did your best and it just wasn't enough in that case. And, of course, it will make the world a nicer place to everyone.
Seeing your enemies hanging by their neck until dead is undoubtedly pleasant, but only fools subject reason for revenge, and such fools should never be let anywhere near power.
Actually what happens is that the population of species A gets split into two separated populations for whatever reason, and over time the populations evolve in different ways, until they are different enough to be considered different species.
A doesn't die out; A becomes B (and C) in the same way than a child becomes adult. The whole concept of species is somewhat misleading when talking about evolution, since populations change over time and smoothly slide from one species to another. For example, there are no more australopithecus's around, but they didn't die out; they just evolved into us (could be wrong here, human evolutionary tree isn't my speciality).
If I went to harbor and everytime a ship left it would say "that ship will sink", and one of them eventually would, would that make me a prophet ?
After at least one failed attempt WTC indeed fell. From what I've understood, it was a surprise to Bin Laden as well - he had only attempted to cause a fire and structural damage. In other words he got lucky. That does not make him a copetent leader.
If I say I'll kill you, and I'll shoot you dead, and next say that I'll kill 10 million people, does that make me capable of doing so ?
All of which is Bushs fault, not Ladens. That Ladens enemy happens to be an idiot doesn't make him a genius.
Why ? Are there some facts there that you can't find anywhere else ? You realize, of course, that this would make said facts unverifiable, and therefore suspect ?
But it's pretty ironic that you were apparently indoctrinated by a documentary describing indoctrination :).
The suicide bombers aren't dying for their country or for the greater good. They are killing themselves because they believe that doing so will get them a reward in the afterlife. The act of dying while to take infidels with them is what's important to them, not the consequences of the act.
No. He's making a distinction between members of a cult - which most terrorist organizations can be justly called - preaching suicide and murder and soldiers. It's not a cultural difference, for there are evil people and morons who follow them anywhere; it's a difference between roles.
And you're still dead.
Presumably to better monitor law-abiding citizens and keep them under control.
Apparently, you non-sciency guys forgot that the coldest month is usually February, which is about three months (this month, December and January) away. Since February is coldest, the climate will keep on getting colder until then. We sciency guys call this "reading the thermometer" :).
The reason is simply that ground and water store warmth and therefore cool (and warm) slowly; consequently, they are warmer right now than they would be in thermodynamic equilibrium (that is, they are warmer than they should be based on just how much warmth they get from the Sun), and will keep on getting colder even after the energy flow starts increasing again after winter solstice. The equilibrium is not reached until around February; until then, the cold trend will continue.
It's the same reason why the warmest summer weathers only come after summer solstice.
Nature has no balance. It is a dynamic system where some states persist for a while, but eventually they will always change into something else. This whole idea about "balance" in nature is nonsense and meaningless besides: just what does it mean that nature is in "balance" ? What is balanced against what ? Why is that particular state somehow more "balanced" than some other state ?
Continents move, mountains rise and get reduced back down, seas are born and dry up, glaciers extend and contract, forests grow and burn down, lakes turn into swamps and dry up again, species come and go... And that's ignoring things like asteroid impacts, changes in Sun's activity, Earth's magnetic field reversals, possible nearby supernovas, volcanic eruptions etc. Face it: nature is not resting in some tranquil balance that only gets disturbed by the eeevil human beings. It's never still.
As tool-using intelligent omnivores human beings are amongst the most adaptable species on the planet, and thus amongst the most likely survivors for any such situations. Having a population that's spread accross the whole globe doesn't hurt either.
These doomsday scenarios are really pretty ridiculous. Humans survived in the burned-out rubble piles most European cities were reduced to in WW2, they aren't going to go extinct because tuna runs out.
Don't worry. With that attitude you won't, for very long anyway.
Whoever can take away a particular right of yours is the ultimate arbiter of whether you have it or not. That someone is usually the government, since it is the strongest entity around. So yeah, the governments are the ultimate decider of what set of rights they bother honoring, and the rest are just fancy philosophical concepts which have nothing to do with your life.
Might does not make right, but neither does right make might.
So stop fixing the damn thing. Why on Earth would you "have to" keep on fixing it ? Are you codependent or something ?
Besides, it sounds to me like she's just using it as an excuse to get your attention. If I'm right, then she'll just switches to some other method if the computer problem ever gets solved for good.
Hunter Safety and Driver Safety are supposed to keep you from killing yourself or anyone else. Surfer Safety is supposed to keep your computer from being hijacked. Please don't try to make it sound comparable to the former two.
6. The 32-bit Era (PS1, N64) - At least twice as good as the 16-bit era.
I have to disagree here. PS1 and N64 marked the transfer from 2D into 3D graphics. While this works for some game types - RPGs and others which don't require accurate controls or good situation awareness - it killed platformers. You just can't get the same level of control and situation awareness in 3D than you can get in 2D.
3D games also take much more resources to develop than 2D ones, since there still aren't any good 3D modellers - and with "good" I mean "learning curve is flatter than himalaya" - and especially not ones that would make content suitable for real-time game engines where the minimum polygon count is a must. They usually look worse too, especially if you compare games running in the same resolution.
So no, 32-bit era is not "twice as good as 16-bit era". It is the era where many of the problems of current games (spiraling development costs) originate. It has some good games - Final Fantasy 7, Chrono Cross - but they sure as Hell aren't twice as good as their predecessors (FF6 and Chrono Trigger).
Hmm... I have a gig of memory, and 5 gigs of swap, and have often hit 3 gig swap use mark just in my normal desktop use. Of course I also have 12 virtual desktops configured right now :)...
In any case, 768 MB might seem like a lot of memory, but it isn't really. Textures are 2D images, and when you double the resolution, you quadruple memory consumption. And, of course, more complex scenes require more textures, not just higher resolution ones. Then there's bumbmapping and such things, all of which require their own textures.
Graphics take memory. A lot of it. 768 MB is going to be too little eventually.