Or low confidence. Who else would Christie's normally consult about the authenticity of film or TV props if not the studio? If there's a sole source for the items, then there's also a sole source to authenticate them, and if they're mistaken then there's no real way to tell.
I really don't give a flying fuck what the Oscars said. It's Hollywood's annual public masturbation scene, and is about as meaningful an indicator of film quality as budget size.
It so happens there are also countless fans who didn't enjoy the films. I went in to FotR perfectly prepared to like them -- looking forward to it, in fact. The first sure indicator they were going badly off the rails was Moria. There were signs before that, but they could be easily written off to the necessities of a film adaptation. (Which was not true in retrospect. There was no reason at all to compress the timeframe so tightly; the passage of an uneventful decade can be shown in a matter of one or two mintues. Turning Merry and Pippin, originally very dissimilar, into carbon copies of each other was absolutely unnecessary. Any two-bit film noir director would have known how to milk the scenes of last stage of the trip to the ferry for maximum tension without turning it into an idiotic chase scene. And making Saruman the one responsible for the snow on Caradhras? Rank stupidity.) Not only was the design of the city itself a disaster, but Frodo's ridiculous movie cliche "NOOOOOOOOO!" when Gandalf went down was like nails on a chalkboard. Lorien, apparently renamed "Land of the Stoners", confirmed it. The movies would be a thorough fuckjob. The next two, which I saw in the hope I was wrong, were even worse.
Were they poor quality in absolute terms? I don't know. Possibly not. The trouble is that with a few minor additional changes there would have been no need to title the films "Lord of the Rings" at all, so completely were the plot and characters twisted. They did not show me what I paid to see.
Anyway, the sequel to The Hobbit is Lord of the Rings. Unless by "sequel" Jackson means films of other extant stories from the Tolkien canon, it will be a travesty by definition. He should start working for the Disney sequel factory; they were made for each other. (The very existence of a "Cinderella II" demonstrates there are some people willing to make a sequel to anything, even a story that quintessentially has no sequel.)
No, "in fairness" you look at the released product. It's what's on the shelves that they're trying to get you to buy. It's a perfectly valid exercise to evaluate it in terms of what it's supposed to replace. Of course MS's release schedule sucks. They habitually release half-baked products. That's no one's fault but theirs, and it directly affects quality.
[snip]he knows how to use a proxy Web site to bypass the company firewall.
Which I take to mean, use a proxy website to circumvent company websurfing policies enforced by a blacklist on the proxy server. I would think the sensible response to detecting such usage would be to add that website to the blacklist, no? (At the very least he's on notice that you know what he's up to, and puts him to the inconvenience of having to find another one to get his porn.) Or are most IT departments clueless about how to handle such a minimally knowledgeable user? And what about informing his management about his misuse of the company network?
Yes, there was that. I don't know of any polls, but at the time I registered more outrage than sympathy. Maybe because I was on the outrage side, so I noticed those who agreed with me first. It's very annoying when you have genuine credentials in a subject to run into someone who's faking it, and who's using his fake cred as a bludgeon.
In the Essjay blow-up, people did get very angry, but in that case Jimbo was smart enough to back off after a couple of days. His excuse that he was out of the country and not really privy to what was going on was not really believed by anyone I tend to listen to, and that he never did admit to a problem in knowingly hiring someone with falsified credentials in his Wikipedia persona took away a lot of his credibility. But in the end Essjay got booted, and after that there was little to be angry about. Shock, rather. Also an enormous PIA as editors went through every single article the guy had touched to make sure he hadn't inserted nonsense that got through only because of his claimed credentials. And in the meantime, no one was stifling discussion.
This case is different in that, not only are the core ideals Wikipedia is supposed to stand for being stomped on, no one is copping to having done any such thing, and dissenting opinions are being "disappeared" using the "oversight" function. "There is no Cabal" was supposed to be a joke. Now it's not funny anymore.
This has been known by some for a while now, but it's not something the community as a whole has been actuely aware of. Now it's in the open -- someplace many feel it should have been the entire time.
I use a 3-button mouse both at work and at home. The problem wasn't with the number of buttons, you ignorant foob, but the fact that with the mouse turned the wrong way it was easy hit the wrong one. If you're trying to do a quick copy to the command line in an Xterm, it's most annoying.
It may look much slicker, but Apple still could have learned from a similar design failure from a few years earlier. The old VAXstation 3100s used a round mouse, and everyone hated the fucking things. As with the Puck mouse, you couldn't easily tell by feel how it was oriented, and with three buttons instead of one it wasn't difficult to accidentally use the wrong one.
At least Apple avoided the other problem with them. The VAXstation mice didn't use a ball, but a pair of cylinders mounted so as to engage the surface at right angles to each other. When you were using it at the edge of the mousepad, one of they cylinders would invariably go past the edge so that the cursor would stop moving in one direction.
All of these animals have vestigal remnants of the lost structures (even whales still have a bit of pelvis in there), or have them in the embryo but lose them before birth, or the potential for the structures is still in the genes and can be triggered with appropriate molecular signals, as is the case with birds and teeth.
Bats lost their sight? Since when? "Blind as a bat" is just an expression, you know, and not a terribly accurate one. And moles still have eyes.
This is actually a good point. I've often wondered about the reasoning behind the assumption in evolutionary biology that all life is descended from a single ancestral line. Surely, if life is likely, it could have occurred more than once.
Your observation is correct, but I think you're mistaken as to cause. Your history is also askew. When the nuclear arsenal was stockpiled, the world was not as you describe. Or don't you remember that there used to be two Germanys? There have been recent noises about updating the warheads with new designs, but contrary to your guesswork a great many here felt that to be very unnecessary. (I don't believe it's been reported on recently either. That means either that it isn't being done, or that the media has lost interest. It alarms me that I have only now realized I don't know which is the case.)
It wasn't that long ago that the US was the same as you describe Europe to be. What changed wasn't the direction of our foreign policy. We behaved much the same then as we do now. Then we had better reason for it: we were confronting the Soviet Union the same way they confronted us, through proxies, because neither side dared confront the other directly. Thank God neither side was crazy enough to do that. It was a bad mistake not to end our interventionist habits with the Cold War, but the fact is we didn't, and it represented no real change.
What changed, as far as I can tell, is that for the first time we have in charge of this country a generation that has never been through hard times. They came to expect, beyond all reason, that the world should be a safe place, and became horrified at the idea that anything, even the most commonplace of childhood activities, could pose some kind of risk that they began to enfold their world in bubble-wrap.
No one wants a child to take extraordinary risks, but a certain level of risk is an absolutely normal part of growing up, and an essential one. Doing things independently of their parents, and taking chances that are not quite safe but pulling yourself through anyway -- or failing and suffering the consequences -- impart lessons that can't be learned any other way. I have the scars to prove it.
So we have these paradoxes. In California it is now illegal for a child to use a skateboard -- a skateboard! -- without a helmet. What kind of insanity involves the police in children's games? And at the same time, we have the rise of "Extreme Sports", where the amount of risk involved is raised to idiotic heights. Not only there, but a simple YouTube search for videos on the subject of "pain" and "ownage" will yield a variety of young male idiots, deprived throughout their younger years of the experience of minor risk, destroying themselves in various entertaining ways that only a professional daredevil would have attempted years ago. Their upbringings have not prepared them to evaluate risk in a sensible way, and its lack has left them desperate for the stimulation it brings. As with any natural urge suppressed for too long, when it is allowed to emerge it does so in strange and twisted ways.
On a national level, when our bubble of safety is pierced, panic ensues. Not to minimize the tragedy of 9/11, but far, far worse things have happened in the world. Some of them have been done by us. Nowhere else did it cause an entire country the size of ours to grind to a halt. For much of my childhood, terrorist bombings were a frequent occurrence in London, yet London spectacularly failed to shut itself down because of them. To the generation then in charge, who had lived through the Battle of Britain, it was almost nothing by comparison, and they seem to have passed that attitude on to their descendants. Good for them! And how sad for us.
I'm sure that part of it is the fact that we've suffered no significant invasion of our home soil since the War of 1812. Or the War Between the States if you live south of the Mason-Dixon line. (In WWII Hawaii and Alaska's Aleutian islands were both attacked by the Japanese, but were not yet states.) Things like bombing, invasions, destruction of homes and infrastructure, happened Elsewhere, to Other People -- but not to Us. It's easy to feel insouciant about Other People. But when that assumption is abruptly shown to be invalid, there's bound to be a certain amount of shock. It's time for the US to realize that it's not special, or that if it ever was it's not anymore.
Only one of these examples is a "textual work", and any encyclopedia has so many independent articles written by so many different people it can't reasonably be thought of as a single work even if it's copyright that way. And neither Wikipedia nor a print encyclopedia is produced with as much oversight as a TV show.
When you find out how a toaster over can be plagiarized, let me know.
To take that a bit further, what the US was pressing for was unconditional surrender per the Potsdam declaration. The Japanese were unwilling to offer that, in part because they did not want the position of the Emperor to be compromised. The A-bombs elicited the kind of surrender we were demanding.
Whether it was worth the populations of two cities is a guessing game. Analysis of the situation by the American side is one thing (disturbing as it might be for anyone who thinks dropping the bombs was unquestionably justifiable from our POV; obviously it was not) but the fact of the matter is it's not at all clear whether Japan would have surrendered before a homeland invasion. The wiser heads in the government, the Emperor included, wanted to do exactly that (saving the Emperor's prerogatives) but there was a strong faction that did not. I'm not sure it can be said with all confidence that they would not have prevailed in the face of actual invasion. Even the Emperor privately acknowledged at least one reason why he would choose to continue the war.
I'm trying to think of what Adm. Nimitz might have been thinking of when he said Japan had "sued for peace". I know they'd been trying to get the Soviets to mediate negotiations, but I've never heard of actual terms being offered. As far as I know, we were aware of it through intercepted diplomatic communications, not by actual Soviet mediation.
In the end, it was as much the declaration of war on the part of the Soviets as the A-bomb that pushed the Japanese cabinet into accepting Potsdam, so whatever may have been going on before is irrelevant. Japan was counting on at least neutrality from the Soviets, and they weren't going to get it. At that, surrender was probably certain even without the bombs.
On the other hand, I do have to take into account the recollections of a friend's mother, who was an elementary school student in Japan at the time. The students were receiving combat training in preparation for an Allied invasion, the girls included. Given that, and given the dissension in the Japanese cabinet we now know existed on the issue prior to the bombs, it may be understandable that someone might conclude there was no reasonable alternative. Incorrect, as many said so at the time and obvious in retrospect, but understandable.
Maybe... if you can call a collection of separate articles written by thousands of different people "one textual work". Odd use of the phrase from where I sit though.
Well, Wikipedia isn't an individual person or a publishing company, is it? It's a website run by volunteers to which anyone can add content. There's no editorial review as with a publisher, and the individual actually responsible for any infringement (and therefore liable) is sometimes impossible to identify.
I've been one of the people answering questions on their Media Copyright Questions page for some time, and the fact is the most people just don't understand copyright. To judge from the questions that are asked, most often they don't intend to infringe. They just don't understand that infringement is what they're doing. But a publisher really ought to know.
...but it depends on their expectations and the nature of the bug. Suppose there a situation where a new feature they absolutely must have in order to do business is so buggy it renders the rest of the software unusable. That's a show-stopper. If the software doesn't work at all, then you must deliver a fix ASAP.
For a new bug where you've recently delivered nothing new that's critical, i.e most of the time, IMO you're better off with a rollback than a 48-hour patch as long as there are no compatibility issues. What it comes down to is, do they want it done, or do they want it done right? A patch that breaks something else because you haven't been allowed the time to test it properly is a patch you're better off not releasing. In my experience, that happens with unacceptable frequency when you crank one out this quickly.
But they may understand that risk and be willing to put up with it for the sake of whatever they want patched. In that case, it's their call as far as I'm concerned.
On the other hand, if this is an online app, and the bug has opened up a vulnerability that has let them get hacked to the point where the goatse.cx man pops up every time they go to process an order... Yeah, that's probably one you should do in a hurry.
Those would have been "games" on the 99/4A anyway, not minigames. For there to be a minigame, there needs to be some larger game surrounding it. Small games were pretty common back in the days of 4KB TRS-80s.
I don't know about the "radar" being a Defender first. Battlezone had one too, and they both came out the same year. The Atari 2600 game from 1979, Star Raiders, (God, that was addictive) had a similar concept, but you had to switch to a "sector scan" view to see it. You could still navigate in that view though; it was useful for locating bases and enemies and traveling in their general direction.
*poke* *poke* Here's one I never saw in the arcades: Fire One!. Looks like it had exactly that kind of thing a full year before Defender came out.
Star Raiders had difficulty levels come to think of it, and it came out in 1979, so it could have at least been cited as an early example.
The first minigame I ever saw was in Major Havoc, which came out in 1983. As you approached the space station for the next battle, you had a little Breakout game to play in the lower right corner of the screen. When you cleared it, you got an extra guy. I don't know how popular it ever was or how well known, but there you are, and at least moderately early.
Physics puzzles? 1992? Since the article doesn't confine itself to graphic games, that's not even close. Try KINEMA. The book the listing on that page was taken from was published in 1978, but I saw it a year earlier on a timesharing system my high school was connected to. Yeah, it looks like a quiz, but there are quiz games too, and everyone called this a game.
I wonder if this guy ever even played Dragon's Lair. It didn't use a CD-ROM because it predated them, and the animated scenes wouldn't have fit on one anyway; it used a laserdisc. The picture wasn't "tiny, grainy", it was very high-quality hand-drawn animation -- by Don Bluth, for God's sake.
The article makes it sound as if the "brag board" was something the game industry invented. Actually, it had been around for decades -- albeit informally, and probably illegally. When you scored amazingly well on a pinball machine, you recorded it by carving the score and your initials into the frame around the backglass. Preferably while the manager of the establishment hosting the game wasn't looking. The tradition carried on into coin-op video games. Building it into the machine did two things. It prevented lying about your score, and it saved wear on the game cabinets.
Well, "best known" is something of a judgment call. As someone who enjoys the Thief series but has never played any of the Metal Gear games, Thief is certainly better-known to me
In an unintentional irony, the screenshot for that one shows what happens when you fail at stealth. Swordfights aren't good things to get into in Thief. I found them practically unwinnable until I switched to a 3-button mouse and mapped the parry maneuver to the middle button.
and as far as we can tell, that is: things behave like waves. then we observe them, and they behave like particles.
Wow. There's very little you could have said to better illustrate your complete incomprehension not only of the physics involved, but of the observations behind the physics.
Things on the subatomic level behave like waves and they behave like particles at the same time. The wave-nature of light wasn't something Maxwell just pulled out of his ass one day; it's readily observable even without any equipment more complicated than a pinhole or two. The particle nature of light is less obvious: you do need special equipment and a whole new theoretical structure to observe and understand the photon. Without the experiments that require qm to explain them, there's no need at all to postulate that light occurs in quanta. The really weird behavior here happens when you think you're observing particles, but it turns out they're behaving as if they were all part of the same wave. Read up on the double-slit experiment someday.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? You must not have edited on Wikipedia very much.
Or low confidence. Who else would Christie's normally consult about the authenticity of film or TV props if not the studio? If there's a sole source for the items, then there's also a sole source to authenticate them, and if they're mistaken then there's no real way to tell.
I really don't give a flying fuck what the Oscars said. It's Hollywood's annual public masturbation scene, and is about as meaningful an indicator of film quality as budget size.
It so happens there are also countless fans who didn't enjoy the films. I went in to FotR perfectly prepared to like them -- looking forward to it, in fact. The first sure indicator they were going badly off the rails was Moria. There were signs before that, but they could be easily written off to the necessities of a film adaptation. (Which was not true in retrospect. There was no reason at all to compress the timeframe so tightly; the passage of an uneventful decade can be shown in a matter of one or two mintues. Turning Merry and Pippin, originally very dissimilar, into carbon copies of each other was absolutely unnecessary. Any two-bit film noir director would have known how to milk the scenes of last stage of the trip to the ferry for maximum tension without turning it into an idiotic chase scene. And making Saruman the one responsible for the snow on Caradhras? Rank stupidity.) Not only was the design of the city itself a disaster, but Frodo's ridiculous movie cliche "NOOOOOOOOO!" when Gandalf went down was like nails on a chalkboard. Lorien, apparently renamed "Land of the Stoners", confirmed it. The movies would be a thorough fuckjob. The next two, which I saw in the hope I was wrong, were even worse.
Were they poor quality in absolute terms? I don't know. Possibly not. The trouble is that with a few minor additional changes there would have been no need to title the films "Lord of the Rings" at all, so completely were the plot and characters twisted. They did not show me what I paid to see.
Anyway, the sequel to The Hobbit is Lord of the Rings. Unless by "sequel" Jackson means films of other extant stories from the Tolkien canon, it will be a travesty by definition. He should start working for the Disney sequel factory; they were made for each other. (The very existence of a "Cinderella II" demonstrates there are some people willing to make a sequel to anything, even a story that quintessentially has no sequel.)
No, "in fairness" you look at the released product. It's what's on the shelves that they're trying to get you to buy. It's a perfectly valid exercise to evaluate it in terms of what it's supposed to replace. Of course MS's release schedule sucks. They habitually release half-baked products. That's no one's fault but theirs, and it directly affects quality.
Which I take to mean, use a proxy website to circumvent company websurfing policies enforced by a blacklist on the proxy server. I would think the sensible response to detecting such usage would be to add that website to the blacklist, no? (At the very least he's on notice that you know what he's up to, and puts him to the inconvenience of having to find another one to get his porn.) Or are most IT departments clueless about how to handle such a minimally knowledgeable user? And what about informing his management about his misuse of the company network?
Yes, there was that. I don't know of any polls, but at the time I registered more outrage than sympathy. Maybe because I was on the outrage side, so I noticed those who agreed with me first. It's very annoying when you have genuine credentials in a subject to run into someone who's faking it, and who's using his fake cred as a bludgeon.
In the Essjay blow-up, people did get very angry, but in that case Jimbo was smart enough to back off after a couple of days. His excuse that he was out of the country and not really privy to what was going on was not really believed by anyone I tend to listen to, and that he never did admit to a problem in knowingly hiring someone with falsified credentials in his Wikipedia persona took away a lot of his credibility. But in the end Essjay got booted, and after that there was little to be angry about. Shock, rather. Also an enormous PIA as editors went through every single article the guy had touched to make sure he hadn't inserted nonsense that got through only because of his claimed credentials. And in the meantime, no one was stifling discussion.
This case is different in that, not only are the core ideals Wikipedia is supposed to stand for being stomped on, no one is copping to having done any such thing, and dissenting opinions are being "disappeared" using the "oversight" function. "There is no Cabal" was supposed to be a joke. Now it's not funny anymore.
This has been known by some for a while now, but it's not something the community as a whole has been actuely aware of. Now it's in the open -- someplace many feel it should have been the entire time.
???
I use a 3-button mouse both at work and at home. The problem wasn't with the number of buttons, you ignorant foob, but the fact that with the mouse turned the wrong way it was easy hit the wrong one. If you're trying to do a quick copy to the command line in an Xterm, it's most annoying.
It may look much slicker, but Apple still could have learned from a similar design failure from a few years earlier. The old VAXstation 3100s used a round mouse, and everyone hated the fucking things. As with the Puck mouse, you couldn't easily tell by feel how it was oriented, and with three buttons instead of one it wasn't difficult to accidentally use the wrong one.
At least Apple avoided the other problem with them. The VAXstation mice didn't use a ball, but a pair of cylinders mounted so as to engage the surface at right angles to each other. When you were using it at the edge of the mousepad, one of they cylinders would invariably go past the edge so that the cursor would stop moving in one direction.
All of these animals have vestigal remnants of the lost structures (even whales still have a bit of pelvis in there), or have them in the embryo but lose them before birth, or the potential for the structures is still in the genes and can be triggered with appropriate molecular signals, as is the case with birds and teeth.
Bats lost their sight? Since when? "Blind as a bat" is just an expression, you know, and not a terribly accurate one. And moles still have eyes.
This is actually a good point. I've often wondered about the reasoning behind the assumption in evolutionary biology that all life is descended from a single ancestral line. Surely, if life is likely, it could have occurred more than once.
Your observation is correct, but I think you're mistaken as to cause. Your history is also askew. When the nuclear arsenal was stockpiled, the world was not as you describe. Or don't you remember that there used to be two Germanys? There have been recent noises about updating the warheads with new designs, but contrary to your guesswork a great many here felt that to be very unnecessary. (I don't believe it's been reported on recently either. That means either that it isn't being done, or that the media has lost interest. It alarms me that I have only now realized I don't know which is the case.)
It wasn't that long ago that the US was the same as you describe Europe to be. What changed wasn't the direction of our foreign policy. We behaved much the same then as we do now. Then we had better reason for it: we were confronting the Soviet Union the same way they confronted us, through proxies, because neither side dared confront the other directly. Thank God neither side was crazy enough to do that. It was a bad mistake not to end our interventionist habits with the Cold War, but the fact is we didn't, and it represented no real change.
What changed, as far as I can tell, is that for the first time we have in charge of this country a generation that has never been through hard times. They came to expect, beyond all reason, that the world should be a safe place, and became horrified at the idea that anything, even the most commonplace of childhood activities, could pose some kind of risk that they began to enfold their world in bubble-wrap.
No one wants a child to take extraordinary risks, but a certain level of risk is an absolutely normal part of growing up, and an essential one. Doing things independently of their parents, and taking chances that are not quite safe but pulling yourself through anyway -- or failing and suffering the consequences -- impart lessons that can't be learned any other way. I have the scars to prove it.
So we have these paradoxes. In California it is now illegal for a child to use a skateboard -- a skateboard! -- without a helmet. What kind of insanity involves the police in children's games? And at the same time, we have the rise of "Extreme Sports", where the amount of risk involved is raised to idiotic heights. Not only there, but a simple YouTube search for videos on the subject of "pain" and "ownage" will yield a variety of young male idiots, deprived throughout their younger years of the experience of minor risk, destroying themselves in various entertaining ways that only a professional daredevil would have attempted years ago. Their upbringings have not prepared them to evaluate risk in a sensible way, and its lack has left them desperate for the stimulation it brings. As with any natural urge suppressed for too long, when it is allowed to emerge it does so in strange and twisted ways.
On a national level, when our bubble of safety is pierced, panic ensues. Not to minimize the tragedy of 9/11, but far, far worse things have happened in the world. Some of them have been done by us. Nowhere else did it cause an entire country the size of ours to grind to a halt. For much of my childhood, terrorist bombings were a frequent occurrence in London, yet London spectacularly failed to shut itself down because of them. To the generation then in charge, who had lived through the Battle of Britain, it was almost nothing by comparison, and they seem to have passed that attitude on to their descendants. Good for them! And how sad for us.
I'm sure that part of it is the fact that we've suffered no significant invasion of our home soil since the War of 1812. Or the War Between the States if you live south of the Mason-Dixon line. (In WWII Hawaii and Alaska's Aleutian islands were both attacked by the Japanese, but were not yet states.) Things like bombing, invasions, destruction of homes and infrastructure, happened Elsewhere, to Other People -- but not to Us. It's easy to feel insouciant about Other People. But when that assumption is abruptly shown to be invalid, there's bound to be a certain amount of shock. It's time for the US to realize that it's not special, or that if it ever was it's not anymore.
Only one of these examples is a "textual work", and any encyclopedia has so many independent articles written by so many different people it can't reasonably be thought of as a single work even if it's copyright that way. And neither Wikipedia nor a print encyclopedia is produced with as much oversight as a TV show.
When you find out how a toaster over can be plagiarized, let me know.
To take that a bit further, what the US was pressing for was unconditional surrender per the Potsdam declaration. The Japanese were unwilling to offer that, in part because they did not want the position of the Emperor to be compromised. The A-bombs elicited the kind of surrender we were demanding.
Whether it was worth the populations of two cities is a guessing game. Analysis of the situation by the American side is one thing (disturbing as it might be for anyone who thinks dropping the bombs was unquestionably justifiable from our POV; obviously it was not) but the fact of the matter is it's not at all clear whether Japan would have surrendered before a homeland invasion. The wiser heads in the government, the Emperor included, wanted to do exactly that (saving the Emperor's prerogatives) but there was a strong faction that did not. I'm not sure it can be said with all confidence that they would not have prevailed in the face of actual invasion. Even the Emperor privately acknowledged at least one reason why he would choose to continue the war.
I'm trying to think of what Adm. Nimitz might have been thinking of when he said Japan had "sued for peace". I know they'd been trying to get the Soviets to mediate negotiations, but I've never heard of actual terms being offered. As far as I know, we were aware of it through intercepted diplomatic communications, not by actual Soviet mediation.
In the end, it was as much the declaration of war on the part of the Soviets as the A-bomb that pushed the Japanese cabinet into accepting Potsdam, so whatever may have been going on before is irrelevant. Japan was counting on at least neutrality from the Soviets, and they weren't going to get it. At that, surrender was probably certain even without the bombs.
On the other hand, I do have to take into account the recollections of a friend's mother, who was an elementary school student in Japan at the time. The students were receiving combat training in preparation for an Allied invasion, the girls included. Given that, and given the dissension in the Japanese cabinet we now know existed on the issue prior to the bombs, it may be understandable that someone might conclude there was no reasonable alternative. Incorrect, as many said so at the time and obvious in retrospect, but understandable.
Maybe... if you can call a collection of separate articles written by thousands of different people "one textual work". Odd use of the phrase from where I sit though.
Well, Wikipedia isn't an individual person or a publishing company, is it? It's a website run by volunteers to which anyone can add content. There's no editorial review as with a publisher, and the individual actually responsible for any infringement (and therefore liable) is sometimes impossible to identify.
I've been one of the people answering questions on their Media Copyright Questions page for some time, and the fact is the most people just don't understand copyright. To judge from the questions that are asked, most often they don't intend to infringe. They just don't understand that infringement is what they're doing. But a publisher really ought to know.
...but it depends on their expectations and the nature of the bug. Suppose there a situation where a new feature they absolutely must have in order to do business is so buggy it renders the rest of the software unusable. That's a show-stopper. If the software doesn't work at all, then you must deliver a fix ASAP.
For a new bug where you've recently delivered nothing new that's critical, i.e most of the time, IMO you're better off with a rollback than a 48-hour patch as long as there are no compatibility issues. What it comes down to is, do they want it done, or do they want it done right? A patch that breaks something else because you haven't been allowed the time to test it properly is a patch you're better off not releasing. In my experience, that happens with unacceptable frequency when you crank one out this quickly.
But they may understand that risk and be willing to put up with it for the sake of whatever they want patched. In that case, it's their call as far as I'm concerned.
On the other hand, if this is an online app, and the bug has opened up a vulnerability that has let them get hacked to the point where the goatse.cx man pops up every time they go to process an order... Yeah, that's probably one you should do in a hurry.
Those would have been "games" on the 99/4A anyway, not minigames. For there to be a minigame, there needs to be some larger game surrounding it. Small games were pretty common back in the days of 4KB TRS-80s.
I don't know about the "radar" being a Defender first. Battlezone had one too, and they both came out the same year. The Atari 2600 game from 1979, Star Raiders, (God, that was addictive) had a similar concept, but you had to switch to a "sector scan" view to see it. You could still navigate in that view though; it was useful for locating bases and enemies and traveling in their general direction.
*poke* *poke* Here's one I never saw in the arcades: Fire One!. Looks like it had exactly that kind of thing a full year before Defender came out.
Star Raiders had difficulty levels come to think of it, and it came out in 1979, so it could have at least been cited as an early example.The first minigame I ever saw was in Major Havoc, which came out in 1983. As you approached the space station for the next battle, you had a little Breakout game to play in the lower right corner of the screen. When you cleared it, you got an extra guy. I don't know how popular it ever was or how well known, but there you are, and at least moderately early.
Physics puzzles? 1992? Since the article doesn't confine itself to graphic games, that's not even close. Try KINEMA. The book the listing on that page was taken from was published in 1978, but I saw it a year earlier on a timesharing system my high school was connected to. Yeah, it looks like a quiz, but there are quiz games too, and everyone called this a game.
I wonder if this guy ever even played Dragon's Lair. It didn't use a CD-ROM because it predated them, and the animated scenes wouldn't have fit on one anyway; it used a laserdisc. The picture wasn't "tiny, grainy", it was very high-quality hand-drawn animation -- by Don Bluth, for God's sake.
The article makes it sound as if the "brag board" was something the game industry invented. Actually, it had been around for decades -- albeit informally, and probably illegally. When you scored amazingly well on a pinball machine, you recorded it by carving the score and your initials into the frame around the backglass. Preferably while the manager of the establishment hosting the game wasn't looking. The tradition carried on into coin-op video games. Building it into the machine did two things. It prevented lying about your score, and it saved wear on the game cabinets.
Well, "best known" is something of a judgment call. As someone who enjoys the Thief series but has never played any of the Metal Gear games, Thief is certainly better-known to me
In an unintentional irony, the screenshot for that one shows what happens when you fail at stealth. Swordfights aren't good things to get into in Thief. I found them practically unwinnable until I switched to a 3-button mouse and mapped the parry maneuver to the middle button.
What happens if the good version of you has a goatee?
Things on the subatomic level behave like waves and they behave like particles at the same time. The wave-nature of light wasn't something Maxwell just pulled out of his ass one day; it's readily observable even without any equipment more complicated than a pinhole or two. The particle nature of light is less obvious: you do need special equipment and a whole new theoretical structure to observe and understand the photon. Without the experiments that require qm to explain them, there's no need at all to postulate that light occurs in quanta. The really weird behavior here happens when you think you're observing particles, but it turns out they're behaving as if they were all part of the same wave. Read up on the double-slit experiment someday.
Yes. Pity it didn't happen in this universe.