It shouldn't be an experiment. It should be a test. And if you fail the test, you should lose your privilege of driving. Permanently. Violations of that privilege (driving without a license) should be punished severely. I suggest death.
There have been many "blood expanders" on the market for many years now, and that has been a great help to Jehovah's Witnesses in emergency medical situations. However, those mostly are used to dilute the blood so that during surgery fewer red cells are lost.
However this appears to be an artificial source of red cells, and would be an even greater boon to medical science (and in the short term, a huge help for JW's undergoing medical treatment) since it eliminates many of the problems (physical problems for everyone, and moral problems if you're a JW) with blood transfusions. There should be no issues with tissue rejection (I'm sure these will be designed to minimize rejection, and may even contain light doses of anti-rejection drugs in the mix). There should be no issues with matching types (These will undoubtedly be either type-neutral or be manufactured in major quantities in all types, thus no shortage and no need to substitute another type).
My take on this advancement is that this is a major Good Thing, regardless of your moral viewpoint.
Not a clue, honestly, but the PPC750 family has branch prediction as a default feature (it can be turned off, though). I'm guessing that minimizes the pipeline flush problems.
Also, I failed to mention that the PPC750CX has, IIRC, 8 pipelines.
Actually, the Wii's graphics are exactly "Xbox 1"-level. So were the Gamecube's graphics. The Wii isn't a step backward from the Gamecube, it's just not a huge leap forward (in terms of graphics).
As far as raw CPU horsepower, the Wii is no slouch. It easily keeps up with the CPU's in the Xbox 360 and the PS3. Only the asstastic custom Gamecube++ graphics architecture is to blame for it "falling behind" in technical ways to the other two systems. Why? Well, let's just go through the specs.
PS3 has the "Cell" processor. It's a PPC4xx controller keeping 8 single-pipeline cores (6 integer, 2 FP/Integer) full of properly-scheduled instructions. The cores run at a ridiculously high clock rate, but are capable of only the simplest operations. The controller runs at a moderate clock rate, processing instruction controls in batches. PS3 also has an Nvidia graphics chipset to handle the load of rendering.
The Xbox360 has a custom 3-core PPC6xx, with each core having 2 pipelines. That's 6 total pipelines in an architecture known for kickass FP performance. All pipelines in all cores run at 3.2 GHz. Xbox360 also has an ATI graphics chipset to handle the load of rendering.
The Wii has an off-the-shelf (read: cheap, well-documented) PPC750CX, underclocked to 730MHz (give or take). The lowest stock clock speed of this chip is 900MHz. The PPC750 has better integer performance (by a long shot) than the PPC600-series (at the expense of some of that blazing FP performance). It has FP, which is more than can be said for the PPC400-series (and all but two of the specialized cores in the PS3). The PPC750CX does not have a SIMD. (The PPC750FX does, though, and it's a pin-compatible drop-in replacement for the CX, should Nintendo feel the need to make a Wii 2.0 in a couple of years.) This chip easily meets the capabilities of the other two CPU's. Unfortunately, the Wii is saddled with a barely-upgraded ATI/ArtX custom GPU from the Gamecube. Sure, they added programmable shaders (not "unified"!!!) and bumped the clock rate, but it's still basically the same poorly-documented, asstastic, made-by-a-black-sheep-team-imported-from-a-defunct -company Gamecube GPU. Thus the graphics are still ass. It can't take the same rendering load of the shiny, new Nvidia and ATI chipsets in the other two systems. But for everything other than graphics, the Wii can more than hold its own.
Given the ability Nintendo has to upgrade the Wii hardware into something great (with minimal hassle), and the fact that they seem to be "winning us all back" right now with excellent gameplay as their focus, I would be worried too if I were MS or Sony.
Star Fox used a 10.5 MHz (underclocked) math coprocessor. (We call those an "FPU" normally.) Later SuperFX chips were clocked to their full potential - 21 MHz. All the while, the SNES' 65c816 ran at a "measly" 3.8 MHz. Oh, and it had a total of 128KB of RAM.
Just to put a bit of emphasis on "console wang" fatigue... The SNES has, arguably, the biggest wang of them all. Some of the greatest games ever were made for it. And when you compare it "by the numbers" to modern consoles, it puts them to shame. All those good games with a 3.8MHz CPU and 128K of RAM.
I just posted something similar elsewhere in this thread, but...
Just publishing a game for a Nintendo system does not mean that you're competing with Nintendo. I buy more than one game at a time when I find more than one game that suits my interests. Buying a Nintendo game and buying a 3rd party game for a Nintendo system are not mutually exclusive, therefore, nobody is competing with Nintendo by simply publishing for the Wii. They would have to be making a similar game to a Nintendo game in order to compete. And Nintendo isn't infallible when it comes to this (for proof, see Nintendo Tetris vs. Tengen Tetris on the NES - Tengen's version was regarded as vastly superior by most players, though it lacked a bit of graphical polish).
It's not that rational, when you really pick it apart.
How, exactly, is publishing a game on the same platform considered "competition"?
I don't know about the rest of you guys, but when I browse the games section (either at a store or on a website), I look at anything that I want to buy, then decide to buy it. I don't buy games one-at-a-time unless there's only one worthwhile game for sale when I'm looking. When I finish with the games I've purchased (either finish them or get bored with them), then I go buy more. So unless you're (as a hypothetical developer/publisher) releasing shitty "shovelware" games, there's an equal likelihood that I'll buy your game along with Nintendo's. It's not an either/or proposition.
On the flip side of things, I will not be buying a PS3 or an Xbox 360, therefore if you publish titles on anything other than the Wii, you will lose a potential sale to me. (I happen to be a Nintendo fanboy. If you prefer to be a Sony or MS fanboy, rearrange the names of the consoles in that last sentence. If you're willing to shell out for multiple platforms, ignore it entirely. It still holds true for a significant number of players, though.)
Nintendo's problems with 3rd parties seem to be manufactured by the gaming press and by anti-Nintendo fanboy-lunatics (not just fans, but the retarded fight-to-the-death fanboys. a.k.a. "Rabid Fanboys"). A true businessman in the game publishing industry would be smart to look beyond that hype.
I don't know what land of fuck-uppedness you hail from, but where I'm from, the law states that the speed limit is to be chosen as a safe limit in bad weather conditions. The cops can pull you over and ask that you slow down, but they can't force it upon you, as the limit is the legal limit, period.
There are no "alternate" limits posted. I was merely pointing out that the limits were not artificially low, and that there is a reason why they're so low. It's not to say that I agree with that logic, but I do acknowledge that there is a smattering of logic there.
Your attack upon me is unfounded and childish. Get over yourself.
That depends on the penalties for a failed unlock attempt. If its federal agents on your doorstep and PMITA-prison time, expect me to fully comply with a phisher, but with fake info. Go ahead. Send him my personal banking data... delivered by the US Marshals.
If, however, this turns out to be toothless (much more likely than the above), poorly implemented (almost a surety), or if violations are ignored by the feds (well, duh), then well, to answer your question, "almost everyone." What can I say? People are stupid.
People without cars can't have car accidents, fatal or otherwise. People without cars that are suddenly forced to become 20x more physically active than they were used to can certainly have heart attacks. Even on the road... so I guess you could count those as "road fatalities"... But they're more likely just poor health and medical condition fatalities.
Posted limits are not "artificially-low", though it could be argued that they do "maximize revenue". Posted limits are "worst-case" limits. Anyone who tells you that you can't go 60MPH on the interstate when there's an inch of snow on the ground are either overly cautious or stupid. That's exactly the reason the limit is 60MPH. When it's sunny, dry, and clear ("perfect weather"), you can safely go much faster. But most drivers are too stupid to understand this, and they just bend over for speed limit violations. If more people spoke out against them and pointed out that the cops are actually making the roads more dangerous by enforcing "bad weather laws" in fair weather, there would be much less hassle with asshole cops writing speeding tickets.
Drivers in the USA are lucky to have stoplights and pavement striping patterns explained to them. You do realize that most drivers in the US get their licenses at 16 having passed a written test, then spending 20 hours "practicing", then driving an obstacle course with a highway patrol officer? They might as well have gotten it out of a Cracker Jack box.
Gone are the days when people are proud of their driving ability. Now, they just want to show off their car, get where they're going, or race like they're on a closed-course or dragstrip. These types of people should not have licenses.
3-second window? Ha! I'm lucky if someone doesn't steal the carlength in front of me because they can't be bothered to get into the far-right lane ("merge lane", or "why slow drivers drive one lane over to the left", and no, that's not how you're supposed to do it) before they get within a 1/10 of a mile of their exit. I have to drive I-270 twice a day, from south of I-44 to the Page extension. I hate idiot drivers.
Traffic cops only issue speeding tickets. They don't bother making the roads safer, since there's no money in that. Of course, parking on the side of the interstate looking for someone "speeding" (going over the legal limit, but probably not going faster than the rest of the traffic) causes people to slow down (= wasted gas) in front of faster traffic (= accident) just to avoid some dumbass hick cop that thinks he can use his gun just because he has it.
Fuck that. I'd rather see those asshat cops/HP-men run over by rampaging drivers as long as they ignore real road-safety problems and instead focus on revenue-generation (read: speeding tickets instead of real moving violations). Yes, I just said I'd prefer dead cops over corrupt government. Am I a criminal or a patriot?
I find it hilarious that the "Re: " prepended to the subject line effectively castrates your 128-bit number into a non-DMCA-protected 124-bit number by default.
You're too late. Microsoft already patented C#. You now owe them 10 trillion dollars and your firstborn child as well as any ill-gotten firstborn children you've extracted from others.
I did a bit of research and I stand partially corrected...
It seems that what I said was the case until 1982. (source)
Since 1982, the legal drinking age for U.S. military personnel (on active duty only!) has been the same as the age legally enforced by the location of the military base. Or in the case of bases within 50 or 100 (conficting sources here) miles of an US-to-[other nation] border, the base commander has the option to allow it to go as low as the lowest age legal for either the local laws or for the nation across the border. Also, bases in other countries can have a drinking age as low as 18, but also dictated by local laws and customs. (source)
Apparently, Wisconsin and New Hampshire are/were proposing to allow military bases in their states to have a drinking age of 18.
Anheuser-Busch publishes an ID list every year, and distributes it to anyone that sells their products. It shows ID's from all 50 states, military ID, various forms of federally-issued ID (passports, etc.), ID's from surrounding nations (and their provinces, if applicable), US non-state ID's (Puerto Rico, Guam, etc.), and several common non-US ID's (some examples of European and Asian ID's).
In addition, most local establishments will not sell to anyone that "looks underage" if they don't have what appears to be valid local ID. The grocery stores I worked for when I was a teen and into my college years would only accept Missouri and Illinois driver's licenses, military ID's, and passports. There was one girl who must've lived in the area that had a fake Canadian driver's license complete with an address in Vancouver, BC. Then one of her "kinda-friends" got a job at that store and told some people about their "one friend with a fake canadian ID" (which a few of us had already seen somewhere...) and she had trouble buying booze there from then on. Owned.
I see a weakness in the legal system here... constructive abuse. It's like civil disobedience, only not technically illegal.
The DMCA (via takedown notices) should be used to massively DDoS every media outlet out there for the next 3-6 months. After that, every media outlet will buckle under either (a) the weight of the lawyers needed to review all of the takedown notices, or (b) the complete content (and advertisement!) blackout resulting from all the invalid takedown notices.
How long would it take before "*poof*! Offending law gone."? Adios, DMCA!
Slashdot Mirror
Google knows all.
HUMMV -> Humvee -> Hummer is the approximate progression of acronym-to-slang-to-brand-name over the past 20 years or so.
Here in the Lazy-ass States of America, nothing is ever anyone's fault. Spam is no-one's fault, thus it must not exist. Problem solved (or not).
It's not the ISP's fault that you got your dumb ass infected...
It's not the dumb-ass user's fault that they're too stupid to operate a computer but think they need one anyway...
It's not the manufacturers' fault for making computers that are easy to pwn (hardware or software, something was an easy target)...
So it's nobody's fault and we'll just ignore the problem until it goes away.
Land of the Dumb, Home of the Naive.
It shouldn't be an experiment. It should be a test. And if you fail the test, you should lose your privilege of driving. Permanently. Violations of that privilege (driving without a license) should be punished severely. I suggest death.
There have been many "blood expanders" on the market for many years now, and that has been a great help to Jehovah's Witnesses in emergency medical situations. However, those mostly are used to dilute the blood so that during surgery fewer red cells are lost.
However this appears to be an artificial source of red cells, and would be an even greater boon to medical science (and in the short term, a huge help for JW's undergoing medical treatment) since it eliminates many of the problems (physical problems for everyone, and moral problems if you're a JW) with blood transfusions. There should be no issues with tissue rejection (I'm sure these will be designed to minimize rejection, and may even contain light doses of anti-rejection drugs in the mix). There should be no issues with matching types (These will undoubtedly be either type-neutral or be manufactured in major quantities in all types, thus no shortage and no need to substitute another type).
My take on this advancement is that this is a major Good Thing, regardless of your moral viewpoint.
IAAJW. YMMV. HTH. HAND.
Not a clue, honestly, but the PPC750 family has branch prediction as a default feature (it can be turned off, though). I'm guessing that minimizes the pipeline flush problems.
Also, I failed to mention that the PPC750CX has, IIRC, 8 pipelines.
Actually, the Wii's graphics are exactly "Xbox 1"-level. So were the Gamecube's graphics. The Wii isn't a step backward from the Gamecube, it's just not a huge leap forward (in terms of graphics).
t -company Gamecube GPU. Thus the graphics are still ass. It can't take the same rendering load of the shiny, new Nvidia and ATI chipsets in the other two systems. But for everything other than graphics, the Wii can more than hold its own.
As far as raw CPU horsepower, the Wii is no slouch. It easily keeps up with the CPU's in the Xbox 360 and the PS3. Only the asstastic custom Gamecube++ graphics architecture is to blame for it "falling behind" in technical ways to the other two systems. Why? Well, let's just go through the specs.
PS3 has the "Cell" processor. It's a PPC4xx controller keeping 8 single-pipeline cores (6 integer, 2 FP/Integer) full of properly-scheduled instructions. The cores run at a ridiculously high clock rate, but are capable of only the simplest operations. The controller runs at a moderate clock rate, processing instruction controls in batches. PS3 also has an Nvidia graphics chipset to handle the load of rendering.
The Xbox360 has a custom 3-core PPC6xx, with each core having 2 pipelines. That's 6 total pipelines in an architecture known for kickass FP performance. All pipelines in all cores run at 3.2 GHz. Xbox360 also has an ATI graphics chipset to handle the load of rendering.
The Wii has an off-the-shelf (read: cheap, well-documented) PPC750CX, underclocked to 730MHz (give or take). The lowest stock clock speed of this chip is 900MHz. The PPC750 has better integer performance (by a long shot) than the PPC600-series (at the expense of some of that blazing FP performance). It has FP, which is more than can be said for the PPC400-series (and all but two of the specialized cores in the PS3). The PPC750CX does not have a SIMD. (The PPC750FX does, though, and it's a pin-compatible drop-in replacement for the CX, should Nintendo feel the need to make a Wii 2.0 in a couple of years.) This chip easily meets the capabilities of the other two CPU's. Unfortunately, the Wii is saddled with a barely-upgraded ATI/ArtX custom GPU from the Gamecube. Sure, they added programmable shaders (not "unified"!!!) and bumped the clock rate, but it's still basically the same poorly-documented, asstastic, made-by-a-black-sheep-team-imported-from-a-defunc
Given the ability Nintendo has to upgrade the Wii hardware into something great (with minimal hassle), and the fact that they seem to be "winning us all back" right now with excellent gameplay as their focus, I would be worried too if I were MS or Sony.
Just a bit of supplemental info...
Star Fox used a 10.5 MHz (underclocked) math coprocessor. (We call those an "FPU" normally.) Later SuperFX chips were clocked to their full potential - 21 MHz. All the while, the SNES' 65c816 ran at a "measly" 3.8 MHz. Oh, and it had a total of 128KB of RAM.
Just to put a bit of emphasis on "console wang" fatigue... The SNES has, arguably, the biggest wang of them all. Some of the greatest games ever were made for it. And when you compare it "by the numbers" to modern consoles, it puts them to shame. All those good games with a 3.8MHz CPU and 128K of RAM.
They're not selling them, but they did make one...
/. a while back. Or was it digg? Who cares? That thing kicks ass.)
I want one.
(I think I saw this on
I just posted something similar elsewhere in this thread, but...
Just publishing a game for a Nintendo system does not mean that you're competing with Nintendo. I buy more than one game at a time when I find more than one game that suits my interests. Buying a Nintendo game and buying a 3rd party game for a Nintendo system are not mutually exclusive, therefore, nobody is competing with Nintendo by simply publishing for the Wii. They would have to be making a similar game to a Nintendo game in order to compete. And Nintendo isn't infallible when it comes to this (for proof, see Nintendo Tetris vs. Tengen Tetris on the NES - Tengen's version was regarded as vastly superior by most players, though it lacked a bit of graphical polish).
It's not that rational, when you really pick it apart.
How, exactly, is publishing a game on the same platform considered "competition"?
I don't know about the rest of you guys, but when I browse the games section (either at a store or on a website), I look at anything that I want to buy, then decide to buy it. I don't buy games one-at-a-time unless there's only one worthwhile game for sale when I'm looking. When I finish with the games I've purchased (either finish them or get bored with them), then I go buy more. So unless you're (as a hypothetical developer/publisher) releasing shitty "shovelware" games, there's an equal likelihood that I'll buy your game along with Nintendo's. It's not an either/or proposition.
On the flip side of things, I will not be buying a PS3 or an Xbox 360, therefore if you publish titles on anything other than the Wii, you will lose a potential sale to me. (I happen to be a Nintendo fanboy. If you prefer to be a Sony or MS fanboy, rearrange the names of the consoles in that last sentence. If you're willing to shell out for multiple platforms, ignore it entirely. It still holds true for a significant number of players, though.)
Nintendo's problems with 3rd parties seem to be manufactured by the gaming press and by anti-Nintendo fanboy-lunatics (not just fans, but the retarded fight-to-the-death fanboys. a.k.a. "Rabid Fanboys"). A true businessman in the game publishing industry would be smart to look beyond that hype.
So does the translation Dashboard widget included with Mac OS X (It's based on Systran.)
I don't know what land of fuck-uppedness you hail from, but where I'm from, the law states that the speed limit is to be chosen as a safe limit in bad weather conditions. The cops can pull you over and ask that you slow down, but they can't force it upon you, as the limit is the legal limit, period.
There are no "alternate" limits posted. I was merely pointing out that the limits were not artificially low, and that there is a reason why they're so low. It's not to say that I agree with that logic, but I do acknowledge that there is a smattering of logic there.
Your attack upon me is unfounded and childish. Get over yourself.
That depends on the penalties for a failed unlock attempt. If its federal agents on your doorstep and PMITA-prison time, expect me to fully comply with a phisher, but with fake info. Go ahead. Send him my personal banking data... delivered by the US Marshals.
If, however, this turns out to be toothless (much more likely than the above), poorly implemented (almost a surety), or if violations are ignored by the feds (well, duh), then well, to answer your question, "almost everyone." What can I say? People are stupid.
Road fatalities. Not just fatalities.
People without cars can't have car accidents, fatal or otherwise. People without cars that are suddenly forced to become 20x more physically active than they were used to can certainly have heart attacks. Even on the road... so I guess you could count those as "road fatalities"... But they're more likely just poor health and medical condition fatalities.
Posted limits are not "artificially-low", though it could be argued that they do "maximize revenue". Posted limits are "worst-case" limits. Anyone who tells you that you can't go 60MPH on the interstate when there's an inch of snow on the ground are either overly cautious or stupid. That's exactly the reason the limit is 60MPH. When it's sunny, dry, and clear ("perfect weather"), you can safely go much faster. But most drivers are too stupid to understand this, and they just bend over for speed limit violations. If more people spoke out against them and pointed out that the cops are actually making the roads more dangerous by enforcing "bad weather laws" in fair weather, there would be much less hassle with asshole cops writing speeding tickets.
:smirk:
Yay for sheeple.
Drivers in the USA are lucky to have stoplights and pavement striping patterns explained to them. You do realize that most drivers in the US get their licenses at 16 having passed a written test, then spending 20 hours "practicing", then driving an obstacle course with a highway patrol officer? They might as well have gotten it out of a Cracker Jack box.
Gone are the days when people are proud of their driving ability. Now, they just want to show off their car, get where they're going, or race like they're on a closed-course or dragstrip. These types of people should not have licenses.
3-second window? Ha! I'm lucky if someone doesn't steal the carlength in front of me because they can't be bothered to get into the far-right lane ("merge lane", or "why slow drivers drive one lane over to the left", and no, that's not how you're supposed to do it) before they get within a 1/10 of a mile of their exit. I have to drive I-270 twice a day, from south of I-44 to the Page extension. I hate idiot drivers.
Traffic cops only issue speeding tickets. They don't bother making the roads safer, since there's no money in that. Of course, parking on the side of the interstate looking for someone "speeding" (going over the legal limit, but probably not going faster than the rest of the traffic) causes people to slow down (= wasted gas) in front of faster traffic (= accident) just to avoid some dumbass hick cop that thinks he can use his gun just because he has it.
Fuck that. I'd rather see those asshat cops/HP-men run over by rampaging drivers as long as they ignore real road-safety problems and instead focus on revenue-generation (read: speeding tickets instead of real moving violations). Yes, I just said I'd prefer dead cops over corrupt government. Am I a criminal or a patriot?
Consumers will get exactly what they want.
Customers will get anally raped.
I find it hilarious that the "Re: " prepended to the subject line effectively castrates your 128-bit number into a non-DMCA-protected 124-bit number by default.
You're too late. Microsoft already patented C#. You now owe them 10 trillion dollars and your firstborn child as well as any ill-gotten firstborn children you've extracted from others.
I did a bit of research and I stand partially corrected...
It seems that what I said was the case until 1982. (source)
Since 1982, the legal drinking age for U.S. military personnel (on active duty only!) has been the same as the age legally enforced by the location of the military base. Or in the case of bases within 50 or 100 (conficting sources here) miles of an US-to-[other nation] border, the base commander has the option to allow it to go as low as the lowest age legal for either the local laws or for the nation across the border. Also, bases in other countries can have a drinking age as low as 18, but also dictated by local laws and customs. (source)
Apparently, Wisconsin and New Hampshire are/were proposing to allow military bases in their states to have a drinking age of 18.
You can die for your country at 18, but you can't have a beer. If you're old enough to die for your country, you're also old enough to have a beer.
If you're in the military, you can buy and consume alcohol, but only at a military base. Try again.
Anheuser-Busch publishes an ID list every year, and distributes it to anyone that sells their products. It shows ID's from all 50 states, military ID, various forms of federally-issued ID (passports, etc.), ID's from surrounding nations (and their provinces, if applicable), US non-state ID's (Puerto Rico, Guam, etc.), and several common non-US ID's (some examples of European and Asian ID's).
In addition, most local establishments will not sell to anyone that "looks underage" if they don't have what appears to be valid local ID. The grocery stores I worked for when I was a teen and into my college years would only accept Missouri and Illinois driver's licenses, military ID's, and passports. There was one girl who must've lived in the area that had a fake Canadian driver's license complete with an address in Vancouver, BC. Then one of her "kinda-friends" got a job at that store and told some people about their "one friend with a fake canadian ID" (which a few of us had already seen somewhere...) and she had trouble buying booze there from then on. Owned.
I see a weakness in the legal system here... constructive abuse. It's like civil disobedience, only not technically illegal.
The DMCA (via takedown notices) should be used to massively DDoS every media outlet out there for the next 3-6 months. After that, every media outlet will buckle under either (a) the weight of the lawyers needed to review all of the takedown notices, or (b) the complete content (and advertisement!) blackout resulting from all the invalid takedown notices.
How long would it take before "*poof*! Offending law gone."? Adios, DMCA!