See, paint isn't really bloody expensive. Anything that goes on a government procurement request has to be really bloody expensive (done by the lowest bidder, because you need to *economize* on that $10 billion make-work project, darn it). Expect the Space Shuttle and our new fighter planes to get a quick laser blasting in the near future.
... what he is really doing is saying "Please let me continue keeping my people poor and ignorant, or I will lose my position". When a tribe gets more integrated with broader society, tribal leaders (who often rule in the "traditional" manner -- dictatorship) generally lose their traditional perks. They have a vested interest in seeing the young folks ignorant of all those benefits you can get from the devil box. If you, personally, feel that your culture is opposed to seeing the devil box output your language then, hey, all you have to do is not buy a devil box and, blammo, problem solved. But that isn't enough for people who want to control not just *their* culture but also the culture of other people (who they may define as being part of their culture -- an assertation which is akin to saying someone else is your subject or property, incidentally, and which I think should be trusted only when the other guy says "Oh, yeah, the feeling here is mutual").
Incidentally, the whole "cultures are unchanging and static, boo, we should create a living zoo of Native American cultures in their 'natural' habitat uncorrupted by our evil Western colonial impulses" is a crock. Not saying that parent believes in that crock but I've certainly heard it before. All cultures are in a constant state of change. America in 2006 is clearly the same nation it was in 1946 but you can see some fairly major differences (*cough* serious discussion of a black woman for President on the Republican ticket *cough*). Before Japan was unified it was a bunch of fractious tribes who outside observers described as rude and lazy. The French were once fierce warriors that cowed most of Europe. "Asian" didn't even exist as a cultural grouping until white Americans couldn't tell the difference Chinese/Japanese/etc so they just made it up (see above: the ability to define is the ability to control) and it eventually became something with some semblance of meaning to many of the people who fit the wholly arbitrary designation.
Aside from the general difficulty of firing government workers, nobody is going to lose their jobs over happening to be around when a mission which had gone years past its planned expiration date finally winked out of existence. At worst they'll have a few weeks of sitting around the office watching the computer screens, then they'll be reassigned to another NASA project. Not that I really think NASA engineers would be in a terrible place if the agency suddenly vanished tomorrow. After all, they're rocket scientists. I'm sure they can work something out. (Yeah, I know, NASA also employs janitors and cafeteria workers and techs. So does the rest of the world. You don't need to have anything orbiting a celestial body to pay someone to move a broom around.)
I won't. Up until a minute ago I didn't even know it existed. I suppose there are uncountably many government programs which I am rationally ignorant of... I hope most of them provide some benefit to someone, somewhere, which would put them in marked contrast to space probes. We could just give Lockheed Martin or whoever the R&D slush fund directly and not lose billions of paying the NASA middleman.
>> What's wrong with our school system that so many kids prefer working 40 hours a week instead? >>
40 hours a week at McDonalds for 3 weeks buys you a PS3. 40 hours a week at school for 3 weeks does not buy you a PS3 today, but buys you a PS4, a PS5, a PS6, and a PS7 over the years... but kids have a really, really poor understanding of how the discount rate works. Thats why we make the decision for them that they're going to go to school.
I wonder if we shouldn't just start paying kids to go to school. More than we do already, I mean -- my high school paid me about, oh, $40,000 or so if you count the merit scholarships to college I got as a direct result of it. But some kids can't see as far as college. OK, we know they can see as far as a paycheck two weeks from now. A billion dollars thrown at a random big-city public school system is mostly money wasted -- why not throw a billion here, a billion there, and offer hamburger-flipping wages for improving their own test scores.
>> While there is plenty, at least arguably, wrong with our schools, the most likely reason people would drop out of high school to work is that there is something wrong with our economy where increasingly families can't adequately provide for children while they are in school; the economy that has been doing well in aggregate terms hasn't been doing well in distributional terms. >>
Given that poverty is on the decline your understanding of the word "increasingly" is at odds with how I generally use it. Yay welfare reform and a booming economy. Anyhow. The overwhelming majority of the kids spending 40 hours at McDonalds (or, more accurately, in the gray economy) are not buying food or pencils with the money. Even in schools in "economically depressed" (why is poverty a mental condition? On the second thought, that might be unintentionally revealing) areas, the kids who are skipping class to work or dropping out early to work always seem to have sneakers which cost more than my wardrobe, etc.
I've promised two younger brothers that I'll be getting them Wii's for Christmas. One of them told me, specifically, last year "Don't get me a present, just remember me when the Wii comes out". So he got an IOU, and thats coming due this year. The other one is off to college and can't share the machine with him, sadly, so I'm on the hook for those two. I'm also buying a Japanese Wii on the 2nd since I live in Japan and, umm, I want one for me.
My plan is that I'm going to take the Japanese Wii back with me and they can have fun using it over the Christmas vacation when I'll be home (its Wiigeon free for Zelda, and thats the only title that matters, right?). When I go back to Japan, I'll take the Wii back. By that time the stores should be getting their third shipments so they should be able to take the cash I'll give them and get their Wiis without having to wait in line or get shot by somebody wanting to speculate on eBay or whatever the stories of craziness are this year.
... this is just because IE6/7 have poor compatibility with the rest of the world. They can't even support the exploits, anymore, honestly.
OK, jokes aside, someone just released an exploit into the wild which *can't work on IE*. And they presumably still thought they were going to get something of value on it. Hiya, FireFox, welcome to the "visible enough to be a target" club. And it only gets worse. I hope your million bug finding eyes are bright and perky because it only gets worse and it never, ever stops.
December 2nd can't come too soon. We had massive camping and disappointed pre-orderers at two local gamestores for the PS3 launch (so I'm told -- $600?! No, sorry, not even for White Knight), but the Wii launch is probably going to be smooth as silk. I say this because I walked into a store which wouldn't even take pre-orders for the PS3 and asked if I could pre-order a Wii and Zelda. "Oh, sure, no problem. Do you want us to give you a call on release day to remind you?" Thats like the definition of non-hysteria.
Take one look at some of the screenshots from that game and *boom* say byebye to your cerebral cortex. Think of the ugliest possible art stretched into three dimensions doing things that would make Japanese tentacle monsters say "Hey, that just ain't right".
Mars, Sol 999. "According to my most recent observations, Mars is still a big red rock. The particular field of red rocks we've been stuck in for the last 999 Sols appears to have a medium sized gray rock next to a small red rock towards the northern tip. I am attempting to move closer to the gray rock to get a better look. See you in 3 Sols."
On the plus side, this time NASA only spent $500 million of your tax dollars on rock voyeurism, making it pretty cheap on the scale of NASA missions, and successful (nothing of importance was accomplished but nobody died and no celestial bodies were slammed into).
Thats it, I'm stopping giving Michael any black magic and switching him to a white mage. (Scary as this is, thinking of him as Michael Jackson actually makes him a more appealing character than the one thats actually in the game. Distilled water has more flavor than that cipher.)
This is a repost of my impressions from playing the Japanese version (yay for living in Japan -- oh wait, you mean we get the Wii 2 weeks late? Drats.)
I have more affection for some of my non-plot characters in Disgaea ("Noooo, don't hit Margaret with the fireball, she only has 250 hp and is weak against OH YOU BASTARD YOU WILL PAY FOR THAT") than I do for any of the characters in FFXII. Not a single one of which I can name at the moment, incidentally. Vann or something? Vash? Whatever, whinny effeminate boy who is dating forgettable Japanese girl (who wears both the pants and the shirt in that relationship) and fated to rescue princess in distress, who currently hates his guts but we all know that will change. Throw in bunny-rabbit-who-looks-like-Storm, tank-straight-out-of-WoW-raid, and Air Pirate to round out the cast. They're trying to save the dutchy of whocares from the empire of whatever, which they can only do by gathering... what was it, I forget. Probably crystals. Thats generally a safe bet for a FF game, isn't it? I remember they spent some time in a mine. Was I trying to find a crystal? Or was I just trying to find the next cutscene? I don't know.
I've heard folks say there is no main character, which is more or less true -- I was equally bored with all of them. The only time one shows a spark of that old Square spirit is when Air Pirate says, ironically, "I'll tell you who I am: I am the main character of this story!" And for a period of perhaps 15 seconds I was thinking "Alright, I have passed the boring prologue, now we are going to get to some ADVENTURE". Nope.
It was about 10 years ago when I played FFVI for the first time, and you can see how low Square has fallen in the plot and memorable character department. Compare Air Pirate Dude with Edgar. The very first time you meet Edgar, he shows more panache than the entire party has in the time I've played FFXII. I remember his lines from a decade ago ("First, I'm captivated by your beauty. Second, I'm dying to know if I'm your type. I suppose your... abilities are a distant third consideration.") FFXII, I swear, its been maybe two months and I would have to wrack my brains to dredge up anything related to the plot or characters. Marle? Marsh? Whoseherface, the princess. I remember her skill readout like it was yesterday (I was aiming for white mage with a sword). Can't remember a thing she ever said.
Anyhow, I put 15 hours into it in the last week after writing this review, out of the hope that the story would improve. Yeah, thats a no. On the plus side, playing with the license board is actually quite fun, and the game is the prettiest thing I've ever seen, even without the cutscenes.
... but insuring marketing innovations like "If this logo gets hit by a falling space station then everyone in America gets a taco" must be like the career-crowning capstone of the profession. "Bah, any idiot can underwrite a life-insurance policy for a 36 year old male nonsmoker. Its the REAL men who can just close their eyes and say, yep, I know what the risk of getting plastered by satellite debris is. Incidentally, $234 premium for coverage through the end of the year on a $200 million policy with a $150 deductible. NEXT."
Puzzle Pirates has some servers which are free-to-play, but when you buy certain items (from other players, for in-game currency), you have to pay a delivery fee in a microcurrency. All the microcurrency begins its existence in the hands of the company that runs the game, Three Rings Design, and is sold to players for real money. From there it gets traded around for in-game currency/items and sunk from the economy as delivery fees and fees for badges (think elevated account privileges for a month). They also have other servers which are your standard one-price-fits-all subscription model, where the concepts of delivery fees and badges do not exist.
You can call me a Nintendo fanboy if you want, but if the big N decided to ship *only* Zelda with the Wii and soldered the diskbay down so that you could never swap CDs I, for one, would say "Good, that way it won't fall out if an earthquake happens while I'm playing". Happily, they have not taken my advice for industrial design, and so I will be able to play Trauma Center, Mario Galaxy, and a backlog of bargain-bin Gamecube games, too.
Daito Giken is the name of a particular manufacturer of gambling machines (you can see which at www.daitogiken.com). Pachisuro is short for Pachinko/Slot. Yoshimune is another name. So, basically, a forgettable bargain basement gambling game.
That is why the only way to sell game software there is software-as-a-service (SAS), basically either subscription, item sales, or market-making models. (The last is similar to eBay or Sony's EQ2 system: you allow people to buy/sell items in your game but they have to share a percentage of the transaction with you.)
Its already probably a trillion dollars give or take an order of magnitude -- what is another 2%? (But don't worry, kids, after we have it we'll find a way to get a trillion dollars out of it! I mean, we could sell tickets to the space hotel for like a billion dollars each! Then we'd only need to find a thousand sucker billionaires and a space hotel!)
Slashdot Mirror
"In Soviet Russia, Wii stiff you!" -- printed on the checks issued to all workers of state-owned industries.
See, paint isn't really bloody expensive. Anything that goes on a government procurement request has to be really bloody expensive (done by the lowest bidder, because you need to *economize* on that $10 billion make-work project, darn it). Expect the Space Shuttle and our new fighter planes to get a quick laser blasting in the near future.
... what he is really doing is saying "Please let me continue keeping my people poor and ignorant, or I will lose my position". When a tribe gets more integrated with broader society, tribal leaders (who often rule in the "traditional" manner -- dictatorship) generally lose their traditional perks. They have a vested interest in seeing the young folks ignorant of all those benefits you can get from the devil box. If you, personally, feel that your culture is opposed to seeing the devil box output your language then, hey, all you have to do is not buy a devil box and, blammo, problem solved. But that isn't enough for people who want to control not just *their* culture but also the culture of other people (who they may define as being part of their culture -- an assertation which is akin to saying someone else is your subject or property, incidentally, and which I think should be trusted only when the other guy says "Oh, yeah, the feeling here is mutual"). Incidentally, the whole "cultures are unchanging and static, boo, we should create a living zoo of Native American cultures in their 'natural' habitat uncorrupted by our evil Western colonial impulses" is a crock. Not saying that parent believes in that crock but I've certainly heard it before. All cultures are in a constant state of change. America in 2006 is clearly the same nation it was in 1946 but you can see some fairly major differences (*cough* serious discussion of a black woman for President on the Republican ticket *cough*). Before Japan was unified it was a bunch of fractious tribes who outside observers described as rude and lazy. The French were once fierce warriors that cowed most of Europe. "Asian" didn't even exist as a cultural grouping until white Americans couldn't tell the difference Chinese/Japanese/etc so they just made it up (see above: the ability to define is the ability to control) and it eventually became something with some semblance of meaning to many of the people who fit the wholly arbitrary designation.
Aside from the general difficulty of firing government workers, nobody is going to lose their jobs over happening to be around when a mission which had gone years past its planned expiration date finally winked out of existence. At worst they'll have a few weeks of sitting around the office watching the computer screens, then they'll be reassigned to another NASA project. Not that I really think NASA engineers would be in a terrible place if the agency suddenly vanished tomorrow. After all, they're rocket scientists. I'm sure they can work something out. (Yeah, I know, NASA also employs janitors and cafeteria workers and techs. So does the rest of the world. You don't need to have anything orbiting a celestial body to pay someone to move a broom around.)
I won't. Up until a minute ago I didn't even know it existed. I suppose there are uncountably many government programs which I am rationally ignorant of... I hope most of them provide some benefit to someone, somewhere, which would put them in marked contrast to space probes. We could just give Lockheed Martin or whoever the R&D slush fund directly and not lose billions of paying the NASA middleman.
>>
What's wrong with our school system that so many kids prefer working 40 hours a week instead?
>>
40 hours a week at McDonalds for 3 weeks buys you a PS3. 40 hours a week at school for 3 weeks does not buy you a PS3 today, but buys you a PS4, a PS5, a PS6, and a PS7 over the years... but kids have a really, really poor understanding of how the discount rate works. Thats why we make the decision for them that they're going to go to school.
I wonder if we shouldn't just start paying kids to go to school. More than we do already, I mean -- my high school paid me about, oh, $40,000 or so if you count the merit scholarships to college I got as a direct result of it. But some kids can't see as far as college. OK, we know they can see as far as a paycheck two weeks from now. A billion dollars thrown at a random big-city public school system is mostly money wasted -- why not throw a billion here, a billion there, and offer hamburger-flipping wages for improving their own test scores.
>>
While there is plenty, at least arguably, wrong with our schools, the most likely reason people would drop out of high school to work is that there is something wrong with our economy where increasingly families can't adequately provide for children while they are in school; the economy that has been doing well in aggregate terms hasn't been doing well in distributional terms.
>>
Given that poverty is on the decline your understanding of the word "increasingly" is at odds with how I generally use it. Yay welfare reform and a booming economy. Anyhow. The overwhelming majority of the kids spending 40 hours at McDonalds (or, more accurately, in the gray economy) are not buying food or pencils with the money. Even in schools in "economically depressed" (why is poverty a mental condition? On the second thought, that might be unintentionally revealing) areas, the kids who are skipping class to work or dropping out early to work always seem to have sneakers which cost more than my wardrobe, etc.
I've promised two younger brothers that I'll be getting them Wii's for Christmas. One of them told me, specifically, last year "Don't get me a present, just remember me when the Wii comes out". So he got an IOU, and thats coming due this year. The other one is off to college and can't share the machine with him, sadly, so I'm on the hook for those two. I'm also buying a Japanese Wii on the 2nd since I live in Japan and, umm, I want one for me.
My plan is that I'm going to take the Japanese Wii back with me and they can have fun using it over the Christmas vacation when I'll be home (its Wiigeon free for Zelda, and thats the only title that matters, right?). When I go back to Japan, I'll take the Wii back. By that time the stores should be getting their third shipments so they should be able to take the cash I'll give them and get their Wiis without having to wait in line or get shot by somebody wanting to speculate on eBay or whatever the stories of craziness are this year.
... this is just because IE6/7 have poor compatibility with the rest of the world. They can't even support the exploits, anymore, honestly.
OK, jokes aside, someone just released an exploit into the wild which *can't work on IE*. And they presumably still thought they were going to get something of value on it. Hiya, FireFox, welcome to the "visible enough to be a target" club. And it only gets worse. I hope your million bug finding eyes are bright and perky because it only gets worse and it never, ever stops.
December 2nd can't come too soon. We had massive camping and disappointed pre-orderers at two local gamestores for the PS3 launch (so I'm told -- $600?! No, sorry, not even for White Knight), but the Wii launch is probably going to be smooth as silk. I say this because I walked into a store which wouldn't even take pre-orders for the PS3 and asked if I could pre-order a Wii and Zelda. "Oh, sure, no problem. Do you want us to give you a call on release day to remind you?" Thats like the definition of non-hysteria.
Take one look at some of the screenshots from that game and *boom* say byebye to your cerebral cortex. Think of the ugliest possible art stretched into three dimensions doing things that would make Japanese tentacle monsters say "Hey, that just ain't right".
>>
Or hey, you go kiss another character
>>
Kissing another character is not the most likely vector for an infection in Second Life. We'll leave it at that.
Mars, Sol 999. "According to my most recent observations, Mars is still a big red rock. The particular field of red rocks we've been stuck in for the last 999 Sols appears to have a medium sized gray rock next to a small red rock towards the northern tip. I am attempting to move closer to the gray rock to get a better look. See you in 3 Sols."
On the plus side, this time NASA only spent $500 million of your tax dollars on rock voyeurism, making it pretty cheap on the scale of NASA missions, and successful (nothing of importance was accomplished but nobody died and no celestial bodies were slammed into).
Thats it, I'm stopping giving Michael any black magic and switching him to a white mage. (Scary as this is, thinking of him as Michael Jackson actually makes him a more appealing character than the one thats actually in the game. Distilled water has more flavor than that cipher.)
This is a repost of my impressions from playing the Japanese version (yay for living in Japan -- oh wait, you mean we get the Wii 2 weeks late? Drats.)
I have more affection for some of my non-plot characters in Disgaea ("Noooo, don't hit Margaret with the fireball, she only has 250 hp and is weak against OH YOU BASTARD YOU WILL PAY FOR THAT") than I do for any of the characters in FFXII. Not a single one of which I can name at the moment, incidentally. Vann or something? Vash? Whatever, whinny effeminate boy who is dating forgettable Japanese girl (who wears both the pants and the shirt in that relationship) and fated to rescue princess in distress, who currently hates his guts but we all know that will change. Throw in bunny-rabbit-who-looks-like-Storm, tank-straight-out-of-WoW-raid, and Air Pirate to round out the cast. They're trying to save the dutchy of whocares from the empire of whatever, which they can only do by gathering... what was it, I forget. Probably crystals. Thats generally a safe bet for a FF game, isn't it? I remember they spent some time in a mine. Was I trying to find a crystal? Or was I just trying to find the next cutscene? I don't know.
I've heard folks say there is no main character, which is more or less true -- I was equally bored with all of them. The only time one shows a spark of that old Square spirit is when Air Pirate says, ironically, "I'll tell you who I am: I am the main character of this story!" And for a period of perhaps 15 seconds I was thinking "Alright, I have passed the boring prologue, now we are going to get to some ADVENTURE". Nope.
It was about 10 years ago when I played FFVI for the first time, and you can see how low Square has fallen in the plot and memorable character department. Compare Air Pirate Dude with Edgar. The very first time you meet Edgar, he shows more panache than the entire party has in the time I've played FFXII. I remember his lines from a decade ago ("First, I'm captivated by your beauty. Second, I'm dying to know if I'm your type. I suppose your... abilities are a distant third consideration.") FFXII, I swear, its been maybe two months and I would have to wrack my brains to dredge up anything related to the plot or characters. Marle? Marsh? Whoseherface, the princess. I remember her skill readout like it was yesterday (I was aiming for white mage with a sword). Can't remember a thing she ever said.
Anyhow, I put 15 hours into it in the last week after writing this review, out of the hope that the story would improve. Yeah, thats a no. On the plus side, playing with the license board is actually quite fun, and the game is the prettiest thing I've ever seen, even without the cutscenes.
I had 18 hours but SOMEBODY had to have a long lunch... Lets have some more efficiency in our ruthless efficiency, people!
The number of semi-protected entries has tripled in the last six months.
... but insuring marketing innovations like "If this logo gets hit by a falling space station then everyone in America gets a taco" must be like the career-crowning capstone of the profession. "Bah, any idiot can underwrite a life-insurance policy for a 36 year old male nonsmoker. Its the REAL men who can just close their eyes and say, yep, I know what the risk of getting plastered by satellite debris is. Incidentally, $234 premium for coverage through the end of the year on a $200 million policy with a $150 deductible. NEXT."
>>
P.S. Cocktard is not covered by the FF spell checker.
>>
Well, IE missed it, too!
Puzzle Pirates has some servers which are free-to-play, but when you buy certain items (from other players, for in-game currency), you have to pay a delivery fee in a microcurrency. All the microcurrency begins its existence in the hands of the company that runs the game, Three Rings Design, and is sold to players for real money. From there it gets traded around for in-game currency/items and sunk from the economy as delivery fees and fees for badges (think elevated account privileges for a month). They also have other servers which are your standard one-price-fits-all subscription model, where the concepts of delivery fees and badges do not exist.
You can call me a Nintendo fanboy if you want, but if the big N decided to ship *only* Zelda with the Wii and soldered the diskbay down so that you could never swap CDs I, for one, would say "Good, that way it won't fall out if an earthquake happens while I'm playing". Happily, they have not taken my advice for industrial design, and so I will be able to play Trauma Center, Mario Galaxy, and a backlog of bargain-bin Gamecube games, too.
Daito Giken is the name of a particular manufacturer of gambling machines (you can see which at www.daitogiken.com). Pachisuro is short for Pachinko/Slot. Yoshimune is another name. So, basically, a forgettable bargain basement gambling game.
That is why the only way to sell game software there is software-as-a-service (SAS), basically either subscription, item sales, or market-making models. (The last is similar to eBay or Sony's EQ2 system: you allow people to buy/sell items in your game but they have to share a percentage of the transaction with you.)
They could be phishing based on Wii preorders, or some other gadget people would have memory of attempting to purchase.
Its already probably a trillion dollars give or take an order of magnitude -- what is another 2%? (But don't worry, kids, after we have it we'll find a way to get a trillion dollars out of it! I mean, we could sell tickets to the space hotel for like a billion dollars each! Then we'd only need to find a thousand sucker billionaires and a space hotel!)
check+the+rfc+this+is+legal+but+nobody+codes+for+i t@yourdomain.com