Don't use a fan for propulsion: drag the thing behind drive wheels.
This would defeat one of the ideas of maglev, which was to do away with wheels, tracks, suspension mechanisms etc.
I thought the point was "go real fast for cheap." If you can still go real fast using drive wheels, and it keeps your cost per mile of track down, you're ahead of the game.
The designs I'm thinking of use two sets of magnets: one for propulsion, one for levitation. There would be no sync necessary, as the levitation magnets emit a constant field. Depending on design, we're talking about distances of 10-30 centimeters (4-12 inches) between the track magnets and the train magnets. That's not a whole lot of tolerance there. I don't know whether such precision can be achieved with a hover mechanism. As far as precision in a hovercraft goes, you basically have to modulate the engine forcing air into the skirt. It will naturally "want" to hover so that the skirt is just above the track. It should actually be fairly straightforward: tell the engines to keep the train x.y inches off the ground, monitor with sensors, increase engine speed if below that, decrease if above, watch for oscillation and dampen it. Certainly no more difficult than maglev, in fact fairly similar.
Probably saftey concerns... you don't even want a chance of losing that cushion at 500 km/h.
The same applies to maglevs as well, though, and the air-cushion approach is much much simpler. Plus, the air cushion wouldn't go out all at once if it was even partially being fed by air scoops, and you could set it up to land on bogey wheels and roll to a stop.
Have you ever seen a hovercraft do 300mph? No, but I'm willing to believe.:) The big thing is, military hovercraft are designed to go through chop and over rocks the size of automobiles without blinking, whereas this would be designed to run on a fairly smooth concrete track. The air cushion could be orders of magnitude smaller, and fit the track infinitely better. That could make it a very different animal.
There are a few things to consider: 1) hovercrafts' design requirements make them very un-aerodynamic
So design for negative lift, and keep the air cushion as thin as practical. Don't use a fan for propulsion: drag the thing behind drive wheels.
2) reaching speeds of this magnitude (while factoring in the aerodynamics) would require a lot of energy
A lot less than lifting the thing on electromagnets, I'll bet. Especially when you can fill the cushion by scooping in air from outside.
3) the air cushion is a very imprecise and unstable way of keeping a (moving) vehicle a certain distance from the ground
Are you saying this based on experience? It seems like it would be extremely straightforward to me, compared to trying to synch the magnets in the track for a maglev.
4) magnetic levitation is quieter (and thus more comfortable for the passengers)
I agree, this would definitely be a problem to overcome. I would try to make the air cushion as thin and its surface area as small as possible.
5) the constant magnetic field of the levitation part is the source of on-board electricity (a conductor moving perpendicular(ly?) to the magnetic field has electricity induced in it), which would be hard to compensate for in a hovercraft considering extra weight required
This is a solved problem: use a third rail. Your drive wheels will have to be in touch with the surface anyway.
I could prolly think of a few more, but my brain hasn't recovered from the weekend yet.
I confess, I'm not an engineer, but I'm still wondering if the concept would work. Someone posted a link to a French design effort, and I'm planning to read it later (Le francais c'est sympa!).
You can extend that idea a bit further and do away with the cusion and make it fly by using a WIG (Wing In Ground-effect).
Can a WIG fly low enough to physically follow a track? I thought they flew at 15-30 feet off the surface. If you lose the ability to run along the track, and only along the track, it's really not a train any more.
If your goal is just to reduce friction, why not simply float the train on an air cushion, like a hovercraft? It seems like it would eliminate a lot of the complexity.
The air cushion could be fairly efficient compared to military hovercraft, since the ground clearance could be an inch or so, instead of feet. Your track could be prepoured concrete instead of electromagnets.
Incidentally, the "cheap, dumb booster" is a myth. Most of the cost comes from making boosters light. It's easy to make a cheap, heavy booster, but it will barely get off the ground.
Could you please tell me when it was proven to be a myth? AFAIK, it's more of an unproven hypothesis. And most of the cost savings from a big dumb booster approach were supposed to come from operational simplicity, not weight savings. Lastly, the Saturn V surely got off the ground, and new BDBs would certainly be somewhat lighter than that.
Firstly, space isn't that hard. It is non-trivial, but then so is powered flight via airplane. We did it in the 60's with technology so antiquated (from a modern perspective) that most of it isn't even in use anymore. None of what was done back then is even remotely cutting edge now. Which is why there are dozens of groups working on the X-Prize, which is essentially a privately run Mercury/Gemini mission.
Secondly, since I'm paying their bills, I don't care if they're "trying real hard." I care abaout results, and NASA's development efforts have been consistently missing the bottom line since I was born.
The issue is making space access cheap, and that is where NASA has failed utterly. The problem is, NASA is a beaurocracy, and beaurocracy DOES NOT REWARD EFFICIENCY. A beaurocracy is a political organization, and it rewards political skill. Which is how you get the current NASA, which is designed primarily to suck up to senators and representatives by placing jobs in their districts. If a program fails, but its bosses know their politics, they will be rewarded for playing the system properly and not punished for failing. Case in point: the space shuttle was originally supposed to be a cost-saver over the Saturn 5. Instead, it's the most expensive system ever. Did anyone get fired over that?
The other problem NASA has, and it is also symptomatic of being a beaurocracy, is incurable featuritis. You have to have shiny new bullets in your PowerPoint presentations. That's why NASA designs have requirements like reusability, single-stage-to-orbit, hydrogen fuel, scramjets and aerospikes, new materials technology, etc. Making it cheap is a secondary priority that in theory will follow from the new technology, but in practice has not done so to date. (I'm not dissing new technology, I'm just saying that tech for novelty's sake doesn't necessarily get you anywhere.)
NASA is just not the right organization to produce low-cost space access. NASA isn't "designed" to do that.
...was to try and start up this show this season, while he was still doing Buffy and Angel. He would have been better off starting Firefly after Buffy was over, next season, for a number of reasons:
Lots of Buffy fans with timeon their hands wanting something else to watch.
They could have tried to take over Buffy's old time slot, and not gotten the Friday Night of Death.
It would have allowed them to plan out the series more, and work on the setting.
I think the last one is the kicker. Firefly is good, but it needed to have been thought through in more depth.
The frontier setting just doesn't convince. It needs less Little House on the Prairie, more modern day third world. I mean, hoop skirts? The way they're doing it now screams "Space Rangers" when their show is grim and gritty.
Moreover, it seems to me that he's making up the larger setting as he goes along. He probably had a couple pages of notes, bad central alliance, good rebels on the fringes of civilization, that sort of thing. But nothing like the depth and subtlety of Babylon 5. He did the same thing on Buffy, but got away with it because the background was the real world, and needed no justification or work to develop. With Firefly, I'm seeing a bunch of pieces that really don't seem to fit. In the core worlds, we have seemingly "modern" societies and the 1984-ish Alliance. On the frontiers, we have Amish farming towns and some kind of Old South-style aristocracy. The two don't fit together. And it's not just the society: the astronomy and technology have the same kinds of huge holes in them. The background just needs more work.
Lastly, he could have condensed the cast: there are just too many characters on that ship. Nearly every episode wastes time getting some of the characters off-stage. They need to go from nine regulars to around five. Make the rest recurring parts. Like Inara, or Book, both characters who could come and go and sometimes take other ships and still run across Serenity from time to time when the plot called for it.
Anyway, let me end on a positive note: I still like the show, and hope it continues. I like the characters, the actors, and the writing. And I like the fact that the show is different from other sci fi on TV. So, good luck to Joss and company!
The private sector doesn't want anything to do with manned spaceflight, unless a government is footing the bill. It's simply not even close to profitable, breathless nonsense about microgravity manufacturing or space tourism notwithstanding (those Russian tourist flights would not make economic sense unless ISS resupply were paying for the lions share of the launch.)
In reality, the private sector is continuing to look into it and try to find profit centers such as suborbital "tourism" flights. There would be a hell of a lot more potential profit centers if the goverment would stop subsidizing the established players from the Cold War. It is difficult to compete with someone being subsidized by your potential client.
Jon Acheson
What made you decide to accept various roles?
on
Ask William Shatner
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm wondering what made you decide to accept the various roles you have played in movies and television, particularly after you were established as an actor and money was less of an immediate issue.
Was it the type of role, the people involved in the production, the script, the chance to do something new?
What do you look for currently?
Jon Acheson
But how long does it last?
on
Lotus Nanotech
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I mean, if the crystals are that small, how long before they erode away?
On the lotus plant, I would imagine that the crystals are continually being replenished, and even then how long does the blossom last?
"Bucking the content industry" would have ensured that they would not have been able to bundle DVD player software with the console, a big feature to lose when their competitor the PS2 does work as a dvd player.
...some SQL servers are dramatically faster if you specify "where a=b and b=c and a=c" than if you only specify "where a=b and b=c" even though the result set is the same.
I'm not a professional SQL programmer, though I've dabbled, so I'd really like to know why this is true. Is it because in the first case, the interpreter can compare all three variables at once, instead of in two different steps in the second case?
I work on this type of stuff and I think it's to early to determine anything on the subject at the moment. I don't usually say this but it's true in this circumstance.
Oh my GOD, an open and honest scientist! I wish more scientists had the honesty to say "we don't know yet."
At least they both have scroll wheels. I bought a Logitech scroll mouse for my Mac at work out of my own pocket because the buttonless mouse sucked so bad.
There are a number of Japanese laptop makers that have been producing very nice high-end Windows laptops with brushed metal cases for some time now.
See http://www.dynamism.com for what I mean. Particularly the Panasonic models, which have been objects of lust for me ever since I saw a Japanese executive with one back in 2000.
So no, Apple didn't invent that look, thanks for playing.
The Saturn V blueprints are stored on microfilm in a NASA library vault. They weren't lost. That's an urban myth.
The problem, though, is that all of the tooling for manufacturing the Saturn 5 is gone, and much of the componentry is not being manufactured any more either. I'd guess that the entire electrical system would have to be redesigned from scratch, for instance. Plus there were some fiddly bits like the baffles in the engines which would probably have to be rediscovered through experimentation.
At this point, it would be better to build a new heavy lift rocket with only thousands of parts. But in order to do that, you have to get NASA out of the picture.
Jon Acheson
Re:But I disagree with your basic unprovable premi
on
Downloading The Mind
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· Score: 2
No, *you* prove that God exists:)
I'm not the one claiming my religious viewpoint as a fundamental arguing point. If I argued a scientific point based on "God says so," I would be just as wrong as you are.
Alternatively, I could just invoke Ockham's Razor.
Ockham's Razor isn't a proof, it's a method of comparing unproven theories. To which I quote H.L. Mencken: "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
Jon Acheson
But I disagree with your basic unprovable premise!
on
Downloading The Mind
·
· Score: 2
As an atheist, I don't think there's anything so special about the brain.
I accept that you feel that way, but I don't accept this as a "non-religious" argument. Though I'm not claiming you believe in any type of a God, your argument is clearly based on the precepts of atheism, rather than on demonstration of facts.
There's no soul there, put there by some random deity. There's no magic.
Prove it. Until you do, you're simply making an argument that the fundamental unprovable assumptions of your way of thought are correct. And I can't help but view this as a religious argument.
The new high-level Palms come out at the end of the month.
One is a 16MB Palm "Tungsten T" with a hirez color screen, bluetooth, a 175mhz Arm Processor, Palm OS 5, headphone jack, SD slot, and Bluetooth. And a telescoping shell that closes up to cover the Graffiti area, fwiw.
The other is the "Tungsten W" which is the new wireless model, which is kind of like the next-gen version of the Handspring Treo, except that it's made by Palm, and it's not a handset (it uses a headset jacked into the unit for cellphone conversation). Also Palm OS 5, same processor.
It's no great wonder that Palm Inc. is dying a slow death.
Only if by "slow death" you mean continuing to totally dominate their market and expand into new market segments. My guess is the Zire will be a big hit in the high school market that will lead to even more sales in the years to come as Zire users upgrade to newer more powerful Palms.
Jon Acheson
You've got that exactly backwards.
on
Xbox Live Beta Report
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· Score: 3, Insightful
No, the leading console GETS the most shovelware, because it has the most consumers, and therefore a better chance to sell more of any particular title. It also gets the most nifty niche-type games, like dance games or RPGs or puzzle or strategy or shooters or what have you, because even though those games will only attract 1/10th the audience of a GTA3, with the big consumer base of a leading system, that's enough.
Microsoft has nothing to fear about the viability of the X-Box: in a year or so, the X-Box will become the dominant console platform.
You could have fooled me. In Japan, XBox is locked in a life or death struggle with the Dreamcast for third place. And the Dreamcast has been dead for a year and a half.
The PS2 had a head start in the shovel-wars, but the X-Box was designed from the ground up to be a shovelware console platform. What with its use of fairly stock hardware components and the industry standard Direct3D API, porting games from Windows (another big shovelware substrate) should be easy. Developers which find getting decent results on the PS2 or Gamecube difficult will flock to the X-Box.
Welcome to October 2002. If it weren't for the infinitely deep pockets of the parent company, XBox would aready be dead. As it is, it's on life support, because Microsoft can pay companies up front to produce a game for the XBox, which is about the only way they would ever do it.
And, FWIW, development on Gamecube is rumored to be a breeze.
I could be wrong on this. In a year I'd love to be proven wrong.
At least, in the group of people I know. I only know of one person out of the dozens of people I know who play video games who deals with pirated games a lot, and even then it's hard to say which games are pirates and which games are backup copies.
Does the XBox have regional lockout like other consoles do?
Slashdot Mirror
Don't use a fan for propulsion: drag the thing behind drive wheels.
This would defeat one of the ideas of maglev, which was to do away with wheels, tracks, suspension mechanisms etc.
I thought the point was "go real fast for cheap." If you can still go real fast using drive wheels, and it keeps your cost per mile of track down, you're ahead of the game.
The designs I'm thinking of use two sets of magnets: one for propulsion, one for levitation. There would be no sync necessary, as the levitation magnets emit a constant field. Depending on design, we're talking about distances of 10-30 centimeters (4-12 inches) between the track magnets and the train magnets. That's not a whole lot of tolerance there. I don't know whether such precision can be achieved with a hover mechanism.
As far as precision in a hovercraft goes, you basically have to modulate the engine forcing air into the skirt. It will naturally "want" to hover so that the skirt is just above the track. It should actually be fairly straightforward: tell the engines to keep the train x.y inches off the ground, monitor with sensors, increase engine speed if below that, decrease if above, watch for oscillation and dampen it. Certainly no more difficult than maglev, in fact fairly similar.
And much, much cheaper per km of track.
Jon Acheson
Probably saftey concerns... you don't even want a chance of losing that cushion at 500 km/h.
The same applies to maglevs as well, though, and the air-cushion approach is much much simpler. Plus, the air cushion wouldn't go out all at once if it was even partially being fed by air scoops, and you could set it up to land on bogey wheels and roll to a stop.
Jon Acheson
Have you ever seen a hovercraft do 300mph? :) The big thing is, military hovercraft are designed to go through chop and over rocks the size of automobiles without blinking, whereas this would be designed to run on a fairly smooth concrete track. The air cushion could be orders of magnitude smaller, and fit the track infinitely better. That could make it a very different animal.
No, but I'm willing to believe.
There are a few things to consider:
1) hovercrafts' design requirements make them very un-aerodynamic
So design for negative lift, and keep the air cushion as thin as practical. Don't use a fan for propulsion: drag the thing behind drive wheels.
2) reaching speeds of this magnitude (while factoring in the aerodynamics) would require a lot of energy
A lot less than lifting the thing on electromagnets, I'll bet. Especially when you can fill the cushion by scooping in air from outside.
3) the air cushion is a very imprecise and unstable way of keeping a (moving) vehicle a certain distance from the ground
Are you saying this based on experience? It seems like it would be extremely straightforward to me, compared to trying to synch the magnets in the track for a maglev.
4) magnetic levitation is quieter (and thus more comfortable for the passengers)
I agree, this would definitely be a problem to overcome. I would try to make the air cushion as thin and its surface area as small as possible.
5) the constant magnetic field of the levitation part is the source of on-board electricity (a conductor moving perpendicular(ly?) to the magnetic field has electricity induced in it), which would be hard to compensate for in a hovercraft considering extra weight required
This is a solved problem: use a third rail. Your drive wheels will have to be in touch with the surface anyway.
I could prolly think of a few more, but my brain hasn't recovered from the weekend yet.
I confess, I'm not an engineer, but I'm still wondering if the concept would work. Someone posted a link to a French design effort, and I'm planning to read it later (Le francais c'est sympa!).
Jon Acheson
You can extend that idea a bit further and do away with the cusion and make it fly by using a WIG (Wing In Ground-effect).
Can a WIG fly low enough to physically follow a track? I thought they flew at 15-30 feet off the surface. If you lose the ability to run along the track, and only along the track, it's really not a train any more.
Jon Acheson
If your goal is just to reduce friction, why not simply float the train on an air cushion, like a hovercraft? It seems like it would eliminate a lot of the complexity.
The air cushion could be fairly efficient compared to military hovercraft, since the ground clearance could be an inch or so, instead of feet. Your track could be prepoured concrete instead of electromagnets.
I'm probably missing something.
Jon Acheson
Could you please tell me when it was proven to be a myth? AFAIK, it's more of an unproven hypothesis. And most of the cost savings from a big dumb booster approach were supposed to come from operational simplicity, not weight savings. Lastly, the Saturn V surely got off the ground, and new BDBs would certainly be somewhat lighter than that.
Jon Acheson
Bullshit!
Firstly, space isn't that hard. It is non-trivial, but then so is powered flight via airplane. We did it in the 60's with technology so antiquated (from a modern perspective) that most of it isn't even in use anymore. None of what was done back then is even remotely cutting edge now. Which is why there are dozens of groups working on the X-Prize, which is essentially a privately run Mercury/Gemini mission.
Secondly, since I'm paying their bills, I don't care if they're "trying real hard." I care abaout results, and NASA's development efforts have been consistently missing the bottom line since I was born.
The issue is making space access cheap, and that is where NASA has failed utterly. The problem is, NASA is a beaurocracy, and beaurocracy DOES NOT REWARD EFFICIENCY. A beaurocracy is a political organization, and it rewards political skill. Which is how you get the current NASA, which is designed primarily to suck up to senators and representatives by placing jobs in their districts. If a program fails, but its bosses know their politics, they will be rewarded for playing the system properly and not punished for failing. Case in point: the space shuttle was originally supposed to be a cost-saver over the Saturn 5. Instead, it's the most expensive system ever. Did anyone get fired over that?
The other problem NASA has, and it is also symptomatic of being a beaurocracy, is incurable featuritis. You have to have shiny new bullets in your PowerPoint presentations. That's why NASA designs have requirements like reusability, single-stage-to-orbit, hydrogen fuel, scramjets and aerospikes, new materials technology, etc. Making it cheap is a secondary priority that in theory will follow from the new technology, but in practice has not done so to date. (I'm not dissing new technology, I'm just saying that tech for novelty's sake doesn't necessarily get you anywhere.)
NASA is just not the right organization to produce low-cost space access. NASA isn't "designed" to do that.
Jon Acheson
I think the last one is the kicker. Firefly is good, but it needed to have been thought through in more depth.
The frontier setting just doesn't convince. It needs less Little House on the Prairie, more modern day third world. I mean, hoop skirts? The way they're doing it now screams "Space Rangers" when their show is grim and gritty.
Moreover, it seems to me that he's making up the larger setting as he goes along. He probably had a couple pages of notes, bad central alliance, good rebels on the fringes of civilization, that sort of thing. But nothing like the depth and subtlety of Babylon 5. He did the same thing on Buffy, but got away with it because the background was the real world, and needed no justification or work to develop. With Firefly, I'm seeing a bunch of pieces that really don't seem to fit. In the core worlds, we have seemingly "modern" societies and the 1984-ish Alliance. On the frontiers, we have Amish farming towns and some kind of Old South-style aristocracy. The two don't fit together. And it's not just the society: the astronomy and technology have the same kinds of huge holes in them. The background just needs more work.
Lastly, he could have condensed the cast: there are just too many characters on that ship. Nearly every episode wastes time getting some of the characters off-stage. They need to go from nine regulars to around five. Make the rest recurring parts. Like Inara, or Book, both characters who could come and go and sometimes take other ships and still run across Serenity from time to time when the plot called for it.
Anyway, let me end on a positive note: I still like the show, and hope it continues. I like the characters, the actors, and the writing. And I like the fact that the show is different from other sci fi on TV. So, good luck to Joss and company!
Jon Acheson
In reality, the private sector is continuing to look into it and try to find profit centers such as suborbital "tourism" flights. There would be a hell of a lot more potential profit centers if the goverment would stop subsidizing the established players from the Cold War. It is difficult to compete with someone being subsidized by your potential client.
Jon Acheson
I'm wondering what made you decide to accept the various roles you have played in movies and television, particularly after you were established as an actor and money was less of an immediate issue.
Was it the type of role, the people involved in the production, the script, the chance to do something new?
What do you look for currently?
Jon Acheson
I mean, if the crystals are that small, how long before they erode away?
On the lotus plant, I would imagine that the crystals are continually being replenished, and even then how long does the blossom last?
Jon Acheson
"Bucking the content industry" would have ensured that they would not have been able to bundle DVD player software with the console, a big feature to lose when their competitor the PS2 does work as a dvd player.
Jon Acheson
I'm not a professional SQL programmer, though I've dabbled, so I'd really like to know why this is true. Is it because in the first case, the interpreter can compare all three variables at once, instead of in two different steps in the second case?
Could someone please explain?
Jon Acheson
Is at http://www.docunote.com/.
It looks pretty nice, even has a d-pad/mouse, but alas no thumbboard.
Jon Acheson
Oh my GOD, an open and honest scientist! I wish more scientists had the honesty to say "we don't know yet."
You, ma'am, are a national treasure!
Jon Acheson
The Terminator asked for a Phased Plasma Rifle in the 40 Megawatt range.
Jon Acheson
At least they both have scroll wheels. I bought a Logitech scroll mouse for my Mac at work out of my own pocket because the buttonless mouse sucked so bad.
Jon Acheson
There are a number of Japanese laptop makers that have been producing very nice high-end Windows laptops with brushed metal cases for some time now.
See http://www.dynamism.com for what I mean. Particularly the Panasonic models, which have been objects of lust for me ever since I saw a Japanese executive with one back in 2000.
So no, Apple didn't invent that look, thanks for playing.
Jon Acheson
The Saturn V blueprints are stored on microfilm in a NASA library vault. They weren't lost. That's an urban myth.
The problem, though, is that all of the tooling for manufacturing the Saturn 5 is gone, and much of the componentry is not being manufactured any more either. I'd guess that the entire electrical system would have to be redesigned from scratch, for instance. Plus there were some fiddly bits like the baffles in the engines which would probably have to be rediscovered through experimentation.
At this point, it would be better to build a new heavy lift rocket with only thousands of parts. But in order to do that, you have to get NASA out of the picture.
Jon Acheson
I'm not the one claiming my religious viewpoint as a fundamental arguing point. If I argued a scientific point based on "God says so," I would be just as wrong as you are.
Ockham's Razor isn't a proof, it's a method of comparing unproven theories. To which I quote H.L. Mencken: "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
Jon Acheson
I accept that you feel that way, but I don't accept this as a "non-religious" argument. Though I'm not claiming you believe in any type of a God, your argument is clearly based on the precepts of atheism, rather than on demonstration of facts.
Prove it. Until you do, you're simply making an argument that the fundamental unprovable assumptions of your way of thought are correct. And I can't help but view this as a religious argument.
No offense intended.
Jon Acheson.
One is a 16MB Palm "Tungsten T" with a hirez color screen, bluetooth, a 175mhz Arm Processor, Palm OS 5, headphone jack, SD slot, and Bluetooth. And a telescoping shell that closes up to cover the Graffiti area, fwiw.
The other is the "Tungsten W" which is the new wireless model, which is kind of like the next-gen version of the Handspring Treo, except that it's made by Palm, and it's not a handset (it uses a headset jacked into the unit for cellphone conversation). Also Palm OS 5, same processor.
Only if by "slow death" you mean continuing to totally dominate their market and expand into new market segments. My guess is the Zire will be a big hit in the high school market that will lead to even more sales in the years to come as Zire users upgrade to newer more powerful Palms.
Jon Acheson
You could have fooled me. In Japan, XBox is locked in a life or death struggle with the Dreamcast for third place. And the Dreamcast has been dead for a year and a half.
Welcome to October 2002. If it weren't for the infinitely deep pockets of the parent company, XBox would aready be dead. As it is, it's on life support, because Microsoft can pay companies up front to produce a game for the XBox, which is about the only way they would ever do it.
And, FWIW, development on Gamecube is rumored to be a breeze.
IMHO, you're already wrong.
Sorry.
Jon Acheson
It's actually worth reading now.
They've got J. Michael Straczynski (of Babylon 5 fame) writing the book now, and it's pretty good.
I had thought I would never read a Marvel comic again, but I'm happy to read ASM now.
Jon Acheson
At least, in the group of people I know. I only know of one person out of the dozens of people I know who play video games who deals with pirated games a lot, and even then it's hard to say which games are pirates and which games are backup copies.
Does the XBox have regional lockout like other consoles do?
Jon Acheson