Without a doubt. It's completely in his personality, and he's always been this way. It's been said that everything with Steve has been about revolution and overthrowing stale paradigms. And likewise for Bill Gates, it's about the thrill of the victory. He's a nut when it comes to games like poker or puzzles. Neither of these guys care about money for the sake of money.
If anything is a threat to Microsoft, it's Ballmer.
I used CompuServe and Prodigy way back when the whole Internet just seemed like bulletin board system. I remember those tricks for keeping my connection alive just as well as I remember paying per minute. The good 'ole days!
Netscape 4 was utter crap. I remember that I used to FTP a copy of Netscape 3.14 well after N4 became the standard. I still hate Netscape for that browser, and Microsoft had nothing to do with their demise; it was Netscape Communicator.
I think, if anything, the internet will be their downfall. They just don't understand it.
I'll wager that Microsoft isn't as naive as you think. They were slow to the draw on the Web, but they caught up pretty fast. Microsoft is very good at learning from its mistakes. And they are still important today. Many consumers use and enjoy using Windows, Office, and other Microsoft products. You're suggesting that Microsoft is in danger of going the way of IBM (OS/2) and Novell (Netware).
I understand your knocking Microsoft's for not providing a workable boot manager, but that stroke of arrogance in no way dooms Microsoft. But you have to keep in mind that this matters only to you and small minority of consumers. Most people don't dual boot. Most people don't require live install discs containing 64-bit OSen. And as for the game market segmenting into hardcore gamer vs flash gamer; that's unfounded. It's true that PC gaming is taking a backseat to console gaming right now. Let's face it, the media loves talking about consoles. But there's no guarantee that this will always be the case, and Microsoft's strategic planning behind XBOX and Direct X repositioned Microsoft to be nimble in this area of development. The PC gaming market will benefit from Microsoft even if Microsoft focuses more on XBOX specifically because of Direct X.
And you've shown why it always helps to explain where one's perspective comes from. I'm not an IT worker, so any headaches associated with getting MS productivity software working isn't made exponential by the need to support multiple users. I have worked with many of Microsoft's programming tools: Visual C++, Visual Basic, Direct X, Direct Show, hell QuickC. I've loved them all. I've enjoyed the games that have come from Microsoft Studios over the years. And being something of an OS fan, I've enjoyed much of Windows.
I didn't find anything fanboyish in the OP's comments. MSFT does have threats in each of the channels they operate, but some people do overestimate the threat that open source projects pose to Microsoft.
Yes, I knew that... I just have an easier time admitting to myself that I could die from a volcano eruption than that I could live in a bunker indefinitely with the Cheneys or the Clintons. Let me have my dreams.
That's not a sad thing. I have none of those skills. Sure I can make a radio out of two coconut halves, but that's it!
Now that I think of it, the typical modern American community is totally unprepared for anything which would isolate it, considering how interdependent communities are nowadays.
True, but I was thinking about technologies like consumer available solar power, water filtration, thermal clothes, and hydroponic vegetables. My end-of-the-world scenarios have been the product of '70s and '80s apocalyptic films like The Day After, Threads, and The Road Warrior... okay that last bit is a stretch.
Obviously life post-ELE will be bleak, but would it be any better because of these tools without considering what desperate people with guns and missiles do.
Yeah, when you consider the kind of people who are generally privileged enough to get bunker access, I'd be happier staying outside... especially if I had to share the bunker with Elijah Wood and Tea Leoni.
But looking at luxuries we occasionally enjoy like hydroponic lettuce, filtered water, thermal clothing, etc.; I figured we'd have enough of an advantage. Of course, there's still the problem of ash as you said.
Right, so all the usual slashdotisms aside, how far would one need to be from the yellowstone caldera in order to be safe from the immediate threats caused by lava and overwhelming amounts of ash? Forget about the long term impact to the breadbasket. And where are the legitimately scientific up-to-the-minute web resources that can explain the situation in laymen's terms? I live 1,041 miles to the southwest of the volcano, so I'd like something more than jokes about the economy and "fuck, we're all going to fucking die!"
Mankind was almost extinguished, cut back to only a few thousand.
But this was human civilization from 75,000 years ago, which intellectually and technologically pales in comparison to human civilization today. Wouldn't the advancements we've made since the Toba eruption help us to endure the effect of another mega-eruption?
No, I haven't. And now I can't wait to try it out. Thanks.
But even if I love it, being a nostalgist, I'll still crave the simplicity of the original Asteroids. I think others would too, but we might be a small bunch of superfans, and maybe most of us wouldn't pay more than $10 to play those old games again.
Geometry Wars 2 made me revisit the idea of bringing classic games like Asteroids (1979) and Star Wars (1983) back. I think, for me, the critical factor is HD resolution. I'm not normally one to place graphics before gameplay, but we're talking about existing games with proven gameplay. So we've got to address the problem of playing ancient low resolution games on high resolution monitors
Whether an arcade game is played via MAME or as a port on PS3 (e.g., Gauntlet II and Q-Bert), playing these games in a small window or blown up and blurred in fullscreen mode ruins that trip down memory lane that we retro gamers want. Playing GW2 in the dark on my HDTV gave me a feeling like I was back in my old neighborhood arcade
I'm not calling for a changing graphics entirely. Bionic Commander looks brilliant. I would have been happy if I could just run the game at 1080i, original blocky graphics and all, providing the shapes were crisp and the colors were punchy.
Whenever I play GW2, I immediately think of how good the old vector graphics games could look today, Asteroids, etc. as you mentioned.
What the article's author should bear in mind is that, resurrecting old games for commercial purposes requires the same attention to those pesky marketing details as any new game would. Is one looking only satisfy a demographic that already loves the original game? If so, maybe one should avoid changing the game in any fundamental way which breaks the original experience. Donkey Kong should not go to 23 levels. If the goal is to extend an existing game, one should be careful about breaking the game mechanics. If one is looking to bring a refreshed version of the game to a new audience, then things are easier, but you've got to be extra careful with which games you choose to bring back from the dead. I would happily play Rad Racer again. But in this era of racing games, I don't think many younger people would even try it.
All this said, I would pay $40 for an Asteroids HD or a Ms Pac-Man HD. And I don't mean Pac-Man CE, and I don't mean any of the Asteroids clones.
In retrospect, I think it's easier to say now that Ho Chi Minh would have been better than it was then. As you said, roughly 90% of Vietnamese were Buddhist. There was a growing Catholic minority. Both groups feared the potential for violent religious persecution under communist rule after seeing what happened in China. Diem milked those fears heavily.
I always remember this story (possibly an urban legend) about Johnson insulting Minh once early on, and Minh in turn implying that Johnson's mother was a whore; and thus killing any chance of Minh getting American support. I'm not convinced he was a real communist either. It seemed that he really loved the West and he often made statements indicating that he believed in individual liberty. I wonder if we could have sided with Minh instead were it not for that communist label. Possibly not, since we had previously acknowledged Diem as the rightful leader.
Add to this the fact that some university faculty do share digital documents with their students in MS Word DOC format. Some go the extra step of utilizing features native to the more recent versions of MS Office. This makes OpenOffice a bad choice within that scope. We can argue that OpenOffice will catch up, but that's irrelevant.
Some schools officially choose one suite over another â"â" yet one reason why I was forced to shift away from WordPerfect in order to maintain compatibility.
And finally, some people actually *shocked* CHOOSE to use MS Office over OO. Scary scary.
Of course, and people who fire rockets into civilian centers like that are cold-blooded murderers. The problem with polls however still remains. And my point remains. Polls are reactionary by design. What 84% of people claim to believe is not always reflective of what they really feel. Think about the number of Iraqis who publicly praised Saddam Hussein out of fear of retribution.
Not everyone in Gaza is a Hamas fighter or supporter. Just like not every Jew is an Israeli supporter. Generalities like that which many people engaged in are ignorant and dangerous. And the thing about violent fringe groups that commit to terrorism; they never require popular support.
There is *a lot* to read up on in order to understand it, but hopefully I can summarize it without too many errors...
During WWII in 1945, Japan took formal control over Vietnam and installed Bao Dai as Emperor of the Empire of Vietnam. When the Japanese surrendered that same year, a nationalist Vietnamese independence movement called Vietminh among other smaller nationalist groups took over. The Emperor abdicates and becomes the head of a new government in Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh read the Declaration of Independence of Vietnam which took heavily from the American DoI. After WWII ended and the French government was restored, France tried to reclaim Vietnam as its colonial territory. In 1949, China becomes communist, and this gives encouragement to the Vietminh. France and the Vietminh eventually fight over the independence of Vietnam and the Vietminh wins by 1954. The Geneva Accords splits Vietnam into two temporary halves, north and south. Ho Chi Minh becomes ruler of the north as a communist country. France essentially gets control of the south by establishing a second government. I think the ruler was Bao Dai again, who was a French supporter. His prime minister was a man named Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem becomes a very important player in the war. The Accords called for a reunification of Vietnam after free elections by 1956.
The US, who had been supporting the French for years there, had just ended the Korean War. We saw the Korean War as an expansion of communism in Asia via China and the USSR. Following a policy of containment we felt the need to support any democratic government in Vietnam, especially since the north had been getting support from China. Also China and USSR formally recognized the government in Hanoi as the official government, whereas we acknowledged the government in the south.
Later in '54 Diem becomes the premier of South Vietnam after Dai steps down. Diem was a nationalist, but frankly, he was a thug in his own right. He was a bit of a McCarthyist. He wanted to weed out communists wherever he could find them. He was also a strong Catholic. When he took power, he did a very public pro-catholic campaign in order to get people from the communist north to move south. But he also used his military to go after anyone he branded "communists"; that included other nationalist opponents. As a result, many people were thrown into concentration camps. He also targeted Buddhists and other minorities in the South. In the north, the government began supporting resistance movements in the south, and started encouraging them to create insurgencies. So by 1957, there were hundreds of assassinations on both sides... total power grab. In 1959, the north formally authorized resistance movements (Vietcong) in the south to stage large operations against the Diem's military. The National Liberation Front was born.
Back to Diem. He was incompetent, abusive, and he was quickly turning the people against him. He called off free elections out of fear citizens would vote for unification under the northern government. He rigged other elections. In the US, we realized a need to prevent the south from falling to the northern communists. As our policy was containment, we really couldn't do much about the fact that our de facto ally there (Diem) was himself a tyrant. We, of course, entered the civil war on the side of the Diem regime. However, that shouldn't mean that we supported his regime's policies beyond the fact that he was anti-communist and fairly westernized.
The major problem we faced was that the South Vietnamese army was utterly inept. There were battles where the communist Vietcong were outnumbered by more than 10 to 1 but still overwhelmingly defeated the south. Many of the south's generals were corrupt or incompetent. Diem's own atrocities against his people only enabled the Vietcong to gain support in the south. Initially, we were there only as military advisors, providing supplies and training. But naturally, we ended up taking the lead in fighting the war for the people of south vietnam b
Yes, as I recall, the choices the Vietnamese faced then were communism, French colonism, or democracy under Ngo Dinh Diem, an corrupt extremist autocratic thug who routinely abused human rights, rigged elections and polls, and used his military to crush any groups who criticized him or who weren't Catholic. In any case, the South Vietnamese didn't really choose communism. They were stuck with it, mostly because of the corrupt of their "democratic" leader and the ineptitude of the South Vietnamese army, greatly illustrated by their performance during the Battle of Ap Bac.
And last I read, the younger urban Vietnamese generation have been doing fairly well. A lot of foreign businesses are pouring money in Vietnam and the communist government seems to be pretty successful at convincing people that Vietnam is a paradise. If anything, Vietnam becoming communist might have spared that nation from turning into a banana republic which only plays democratic on television.
No. No one stole California from Mexico. California was a free and independent republic, having seceded from Mexico in 1846. We had a president, granted only for 25 days... but what a 25 days!
The US Navy occupied California during its war with Mexico. After the war ended, Mexico seceded California to US. Mexico didn't recognize Californian independence and regarded us as a bit of a breakaway province like Texas (which instigated the war in the first place).
Polls are all about timing and "location location location". I could use selective polling to find that 84% of Americans polled believe we should nuke France.
It seems the better rule of thumb is that the more loudly someone proclaims their disdain for a group of people, the more likely they are to be complete imbeciles.
They don't, but the lightsaber, like all military technology, is a launchpad for other great consumer products like the lightsaber cheese slicer. Admit it, with the holidays here, you want one.
I'll play devil's advocate and take the hard line approach and say that science fiction is at least in some tangible way about the interaction of man with scientific phenomena and technology and the consequences of that interaction. "The Terminator" was science fiction as was "Minority Report", "The Fly", and "Strange Days". "Alien" was not per se. You could have had the same story using a Cthuluian sea monster on a ship in the middle of the ocean.
"Star Wars" merely takes place in a fantasy world where technology is extraordinarily advanced. In that respect, it has more in common with "Outland".
Hmmm. Maybe I'm forcing a more cyberpunk author's view on science fiction as a whole?
Clearly I am alone in having played West End Games' "Star Wars" RPG. In addition to lightsabers, there's also repulsarlift vehicles like the landspeeders and the scout bikes. Also, fairly unseen in the movies, there's vibro-tools.
And unlike in Star Trek, our assassination droids work damn it.
"I am not saying PC gaming is doomed, because itâ(TM)s notâ"far from itâ"but the PC with four GPUs, a 2-kilowatt power supply, 16 gigabytes of memory, and a stack of hard drives is all but distant memory, at least for the PC gamer."
Seems more like someone suggest PC gaming is dead in order to make the headline.
Slashdot Mirror
Without a doubt. It's completely in his personality, and he's always been this way. It's been said that everything with Steve has been about revolution and overthrowing stale paradigms. And likewise for Bill Gates, it's about the thrill of the victory. He's a nut when it comes to games like poker or puzzles. Neither of these guys care about money for the sake of money.
If anything is a threat to Microsoft, it's Ballmer.
I used CompuServe and Prodigy way back when the whole Internet just seemed like bulletin board system. I remember those tricks for keeping my connection alive just as well as I remember paying per minute. The good 'ole days!
Netscape 4 was utter crap. I remember that I used to FTP a copy of Netscape 3.14 well after N4 became the standard. I still hate Netscape for that browser, and Microsoft had nothing to do with their demise; it was Netscape Communicator.
I think, if anything, the internet will be their downfall. They just don't understand it.
I'll wager that Microsoft isn't as naive as you think. They were slow to the draw on the Web, but they caught up pretty fast. Microsoft is very good at learning from its mistakes. And they are still important today. Many consumers use and enjoy using Windows, Office, and other Microsoft products. You're suggesting that Microsoft is in danger of going the way of IBM (OS/2) and Novell (Netware).
I understand your knocking Microsoft's for not providing a workable boot manager, but that stroke of arrogance in no way dooms Microsoft. But you have to keep in mind that this matters only to you and small minority of consumers. Most people don't dual boot. Most people don't require live install discs containing 64-bit OSen. And as for the game market segmenting into hardcore gamer vs flash gamer; that's unfounded. It's true that PC gaming is taking a backseat to console gaming right now. Let's face it, the media loves talking about consoles. But there's no guarantee that this will always be the case, and Microsoft's strategic planning behind XBOX and Direct X repositioned Microsoft to be nimble in this area of development. The PC gaming market will benefit from Microsoft even if Microsoft focuses more on XBOX specifically because of Direct X.
And you've shown why it always helps to explain where one's perspective comes from. I'm not an IT worker, so any headaches associated with getting MS productivity software working isn't made exponential by the need to support multiple users. I have worked with many of Microsoft's programming tools: Visual C++, Visual Basic, Direct X, Direct Show, hell QuickC. I've loved them all. I've enjoyed the games that have come from Microsoft Studios over the years. And being something of an OS fan, I've enjoyed much of Windows.
I didn't find anything fanboyish in the OP's comments. MSFT does have threats in each of the channels they operate, but some people do overestimate the threat that open source projects pose to Microsoft.
Yes, I knew that... I just have an easier time admitting to myself that I could die from a volcano eruption than that I could live in a bunker indefinitely with the Cheneys or the Clintons. Let me have my dreams.
That's not a sad thing. I have none of those skills. Sure I can make a radio out of two coconut halves, but that's it!
Now that I think of it, the typical modern American community is totally unprepared for anything which would isolate it, considering how interdependent communities are nowadays.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure!
True, but I was thinking about technologies like consumer available solar power, water filtration, thermal clothes, and hydroponic vegetables. My end-of-the-world scenarios have been the product of '70s and '80s apocalyptic films like The Day After, Threads, and The Road Warrior... okay that last bit is a stretch.
Obviously life post-ELE will be bleak, but would it be any better because of these tools without considering what desperate people with guns and missiles do.
Yeah, when you consider the kind of people who are generally privileged enough to get bunker access, I'd be happier staying outside... especially if I had to share the bunker with Elijah Wood and Tea Leoni.
But looking at luxuries we occasionally enjoy like hydroponic lettuce, filtered water, thermal clothing, etc.; I figured we'd have enough of an advantage. Of course, there's still the problem of ash as you said.
Right, so all the usual slashdotisms aside, how far would one need to be from the yellowstone caldera in order to be safe from the immediate threats caused by lava and overwhelming amounts of ash? Forget about the long term impact to the breadbasket. And where are the legitimately scientific up-to-the-minute web resources that can explain the situation in laymen's terms? I live 1,041 miles to the southwest of the volcano, so I'd like something more than jokes about the economy and "fuck, we're all going to fucking die!"
Depends. Which is the one that got everyone caught in a rowboat off a lakehouse surrounded by lava?
Mankind was almost extinguished, cut back to only a few thousand.
But this was human civilization from 75,000 years ago, which intellectually and technologically pales in comparison to human civilization today. Wouldn't the advancements we've made since the Toba eruption help us to endure the effect of another mega-eruption?
No, I haven't. And now I can't wait to try it out. Thanks.
But even if I love it, being a nostalgist, I'll still crave the simplicity of the original Asteroids. I think others would too, but we might be a small bunch of superfans, and maybe most of us wouldn't pay more than $10 to play those old games again.
Geometry Wars 2 made me revisit the idea of bringing classic games like Asteroids (1979) and Star Wars (1983) back. I think, for me, the critical factor is HD resolution. I'm not normally one to place graphics before gameplay, but we're talking about existing games with proven gameplay. So we've got to address the problem of playing ancient low resolution games on high resolution monitors
Whether an arcade game is played via MAME or as a port on PS3 (e.g., Gauntlet II and Q-Bert), playing these games in a small window or blown up and blurred in fullscreen mode ruins that trip down memory lane that we retro gamers want. Playing GW2 in the dark on my HDTV gave me a feeling like I was back in my old neighborhood arcade
I'm not calling for a changing graphics entirely. Bionic Commander looks brilliant. I would have been happy if I could just run the game at 1080i, original blocky graphics and all, providing the shapes were crisp and the colors were punchy.
Whenever I play GW2, I immediately think of how good the old vector graphics games could look today, Asteroids, etc. as you mentioned.
What the article's author should bear in mind is that, resurrecting old games for commercial purposes requires the same attention to those pesky marketing details as any new game would. Is one looking only satisfy a demographic that already loves the original game? If so, maybe one should avoid changing the game in any fundamental way which breaks the original experience. Donkey Kong should not go to 23 levels. If the goal is to extend an existing game, one should be careful about breaking the game mechanics. If one is looking to bring a refreshed version of the game to a new audience, then things are easier, but you've got to be extra careful with which games you choose to bring back from the dead. I would happily play Rad Racer again. But in this era of racing games, I don't think many younger people would even try it.
All this said, I would pay $40 for an Asteroids HD or a Ms Pac-Man HD. And I don't mean Pac-Man CE, and I don't mean any of the Asteroids clones.
Thank you for the corrections.
In retrospect, I think it's easier to say now that Ho Chi Minh would have been better than it was then. As you said, roughly 90% of Vietnamese were Buddhist. There was a growing Catholic minority. Both groups feared the potential for violent religious persecution under communist rule after seeing what happened in China. Diem milked those fears heavily.
I always remember this story (possibly an urban legend) about Johnson insulting Minh once early on, and Minh in turn implying that Johnson's mother was a whore; and thus killing any chance of Minh getting American support. I'm not convinced he was a real communist either. It seemed that he really loved the West and he often made statements indicating that he believed in individual liberty. I wonder if we could have sided with Minh instead were it not for that communist label. Possibly not, since we had previously acknowledged Diem as the rightful leader.
Add to this the fact that some university faculty do share digital documents with their students in MS Word DOC format. Some go the extra step of utilizing features native to the more recent versions of MS Office. This makes OpenOffice a bad choice within that scope. We can argue that OpenOffice will catch up, but that's irrelevant.
Some schools officially choose one suite over another â"â" yet one reason why I was forced to shift away from WordPerfect in order to maintain compatibility.
And finally, some people actually *shocked* CHOOSE to use MS Office over OO. Scary scary.
Of course, and people who fire rockets into civilian centers like that are cold-blooded murderers. The problem with polls however still remains. And my point remains. Polls are reactionary by design. What 84% of people claim to believe is not always reflective of what they really feel. Think about the number of Iraqis who publicly praised Saddam Hussein out of fear of retribution.
Not everyone in Gaza is a Hamas fighter or supporter. Just like not every Jew is an Israeli supporter. Generalities like that which many people engaged in are ignorant and dangerous. And the thing about violent fringe groups that commit to terrorism; they never require popular support.
There is *a lot* to read up on in order to understand it, but hopefully I can summarize it without too many errors...
During WWII in 1945, Japan took formal control over Vietnam and installed Bao Dai as Emperor of the Empire of Vietnam. When the Japanese surrendered that same year, a nationalist Vietnamese independence movement called Vietminh among other smaller nationalist groups took over. The Emperor abdicates and becomes the head of a new government in Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh read the Declaration of Independence of Vietnam which took heavily from the American DoI. After WWII ended and the French government was restored, France tried to reclaim Vietnam as its colonial territory. In 1949, China becomes communist, and this gives encouragement to the Vietminh. France and the Vietminh eventually fight over the independence of Vietnam and the Vietminh wins by 1954. The Geneva Accords splits Vietnam into two temporary halves, north and south. Ho Chi Minh becomes ruler of the north as a communist country. France essentially gets control of the south by establishing a second government. I think the ruler was Bao Dai again, who was a French supporter. His prime minister was a man named Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem becomes a very important player in the war. The Accords called for a reunification of Vietnam after free elections by 1956.
The US, who had been supporting the French for years there, had just ended the Korean War. We saw the Korean War as an expansion of communism in Asia via China and the USSR. Following a policy of containment we felt the need to support any democratic government in Vietnam, especially since the north had been getting support from China. Also China and USSR formally recognized the government in Hanoi as the official government, whereas we acknowledged the government in the south.
Later in '54 Diem becomes the premier of South Vietnam after Dai steps down. Diem was a nationalist, but frankly, he was a thug in his own right. He was a bit of a McCarthyist. He wanted to weed out communists wherever he could find them. He was also a strong Catholic. When he took power, he did a very public pro-catholic campaign in order to get people from the communist north to move south. But he also used his military to go after anyone he branded "communists"; that included other nationalist opponents. As a result, many people were thrown into concentration camps. He also targeted Buddhists and other minorities in the South. In the north, the government began supporting resistance movements in the south, and started encouraging them to create insurgencies. So by 1957, there were hundreds of assassinations on both sides... total power grab. In 1959, the north formally authorized resistance movements (Vietcong) in the south to stage large operations against the Diem's military. The National Liberation Front was born.
Back to Diem. He was incompetent, abusive, and he was quickly turning the people against him. He called off free elections out of fear citizens would vote for unification under the northern government. He rigged other elections. In the US, we realized a need to prevent the south from falling to the northern communists. As our policy was containment, we really couldn't do much about the fact that our de facto ally there (Diem) was himself a tyrant. We, of course, entered the civil war on the side of the Diem regime. However, that shouldn't mean that we supported his regime's policies beyond the fact that he was anti-communist and fairly westernized.
The major problem we faced was that the South Vietnamese army was utterly inept. There were battles where the communist Vietcong were outnumbered by more than 10 to 1 but still overwhelmingly defeated the south. Many of the south's generals were corrupt or incompetent. Diem's own atrocities against his people only enabled the Vietcong to gain support in the south. Initially, we were there only as military advisors, providing supplies and training. But naturally, we ended up taking the lead in fighting the war for the people of south vietnam b
Yes, as I recall, the choices the Vietnamese faced then were communism, French colonism, or democracy under Ngo Dinh Diem, an corrupt extremist autocratic thug who routinely abused human rights, rigged elections and polls, and used his military to crush any groups who criticized him or who weren't Catholic. In any case, the South Vietnamese didn't really choose communism. They were stuck with it, mostly because of the corrupt of their "democratic" leader and the ineptitude of the South Vietnamese army, greatly illustrated by their performance during the Battle of Ap Bac.
And last I read, the younger urban Vietnamese generation have been doing fairly well. A lot of foreign businesses are pouring money in Vietnam and the communist government seems to be pretty successful at convincing people that Vietnam is a paradise. If anything, Vietnam becoming communist might have spared that nation from turning into a banana republic which only plays democratic on television.
Yes, and America stole California from Mexico.
No. No one stole California from Mexico. California was a free and independent republic, having seceded from Mexico in 1846. We had a president, granted only for 25 days... but what a 25 days!
The US Navy occupied California during its war with Mexico. After the war ended, Mexico seceded California to US. Mexico didn't recognize Californian independence and regarded us as a bit of a breakaway province like Texas (which instigated the war in the first place).
Polls are all about timing and "location location location". I could use selective polling to find that 84% of Americans polled believe we should nuke France.
It seems the better rule of thumb is that the more loudly someone proclaims their disdain for a group of people, the more likely they are to be complete imbeciles.
They don't, but the lightsaber, like all military technology, is a launchpad for other great consumer products like the lightsaber cheese slicer. Admit it, with the holidays here, you want one.
I'll play devil's advocate and take the hard line approach and say that science fiction is at least in some tangible way about the interaction of man with scientific phenomena and technology and the consequences of that interaction. "The Terminator" was science fiction as was "Minority Report", "The Fly", and "Strange Days". "Alien" was not per se. You could have had the same story using a Cthuluian sea monster on a ship in the middle of the ocean.
"Star Wars" merely takes place in a fantasy world where technology is extraordinarily advanced. In that respect, it has more in common with "Outland".
Hmmm. Maybe I'm forcing a more cyberpunk author's view on science fiction as a whole?
Clearly I am alone in having played West End Games' "Star Wars" RPG. In addition to lightsabers, there's also repulsarlift vehicles like the landspeeders and the scout bikes. Also, fairly unseen in the movies, there's vibro-tools.
And unlike in Star Trek, our assassination droids work damn it.
From the article...
"I am not saying PC gaming is doomed, because itâ(TM)s notâ"far from itâ"but the PC with four GPUs, a 2-kilowatt power supply, 16 gigabytes of memory, and a stack of hard drives is all but distant memory, at least for the PC gamer."
Seems more like someone suggest PC gaming is dead in order to make the headline.