when it regurgitates lawyer-approved marketing speak to gaming fans totally p.ss.ng them off, and is clueless that it did so, as it's grown the bureacracy like the morons in DC have been doing since 2000.
That's what my son does, for the most part, although he does play Diablo II and Starcraft II online at times.
Paper games - he's in an RPG club at Roosevelt High School and they play a lot of AD&D and other paper games.
As I told him, as a SMOG from way back (before Steve Jackson had his computers broken into small bits by the SS, which I'd used at the Worldcon to fix their DBase II con events schedule for panelists, so I really felt his pain, they were sweet), it's all about the Story and the Story Telling. If you do that right, most of the rest doesn't matter.
Same need met, fairly similar concept, and in those times London and NYC had postal delivery five times a day, allowing one to share notes and such as well.
Mind you, back then that was the technology. This is similar in some ways, but not that surprising.
Next we'll bring back the Jet Pack as personal transportation device, or personal Steam Locomotives (we have a 200+ year supply of coal in the US, even if oil/gas are rapidly disappearing)....
It's also unreported and undisclosed major gaping holes, the ability to automatically run scripts that install viruses and spyware on your laptop, and the clear fact that running IE without security at top levels leads to a compromised PC within minutes on the UW campus, whereas you can run for days with Firefox.
Let's get real, and stop pushing phony statistics.
After all, it was originally imposed on blank recording media - tape, CD-RW, DVD-RW, etc - to pay for the taping by music enthusiasts of album/song broadcasts on radio.
So if they want to make radio music copy-protected, I want a $10,000 refund check. No, better make that in cash - small unmarked bills.
oh, I should say I've done some of the more notable events, like the Alter of the Mystical Frog of the Playa, the Artists Republic of Fremont Passport Office, the Fremont Colonial Expeditionary Alien Passport and Visa Task Force and Travelling Juice Bar, and the Ice Rustlers of the Open Playa.
Personally, I love the theater and the art, and staying up a couple of times to dance all night, but the party thing gets old after the third day or so.
1. Party - this really kicks off with the Thursday crowd that hangs till Sunday - so if you're in party mood, don't go earlier. Or stay home. Yeah, I like that...
2. Art - a lot of the art is more accessible and organic early on, so best seen Tuesday to Saturday - by Saturday afternoon it's way too party to bother.
3. Drugs - not really into that, but if this is your style, then sleep during the afternoon heat and stay up till dawn and you'll have lots of fun - the dancing till dawn part is cool tho and my fave experience was finding my flourescent green artists tube (transparent) when twirled at a giant black light music piece off in the desert with windsocks around - well, it vibrated and the dust from the playa really made it glow like mad - must be the desert salts...
When will people learn that this kind of crap will happen with or without human intervention? The Earth has been changing constantly for millions of years and will continue to change past our existence. Holy crap, a climate shift!! I am sure it was the Neanderthals who brought on the ice age by causing nuclear winter. How else could that have happened?
The earth doesn't owe humanity a living. We're just the latest infestation on the surface of it. Species have been eliminated during glaciations or killed off or adapted to other warming cycles, so if we choose to accelerate the speed of the warming cycle, we get the consequences.
And, actually, there were never that many Neanderthals in the first place. Ninety percent of all the people that have ever existed on the earth have existed since WW II.
According to wikipedia, the greenland ice sheet [wikipedia.org], if fully melted, will raise global sea level by 7.2 meters (23.6 feet). This would put large portions of many coastal cities underwater.
One of the reasons we know about temperatures back during glacial ages is that the Greenland Ice Sheet has never melted. Ever.
Parts of it on the coastal areas and southern reaches have melted in part, but most of it has always had snowfall, even during the warmest periods.
So I wouldn't worry about all of it melting, even though I would be concerned of the Arctic and Antartic ice sheets melting rapidly, which is already happening at a rate never before experienced.
1. The energy stored in the Carribean has raised the sea temperature by one degree - and hurricane/storm strength is directly impacted by the heat storage in the sea/ocean.
2. Half of the damage - or more - is caused by the destruction of the surrounding wetlands around cities.
3. Much of the dollar cost of the damage is caused by the anti-environmental building policies that encourage the construction of expensive properties (like those of a certain senator) and their rebuilding after storms and hurricanes. As we provide economic incentives that override the normal economic disincentives, the wealthy move to the coast and build fancy developments that are more exposed, and sink more wealth into coastal areas.
4. The US population on the coast is growing faster than the rest of the country, while the empty areas that are in the middle are emptying out.
5. The quantity of hurricanes of significant level has not increased worldwide, but the strength of those major storms has increased dramatically (double).
6. The Carribean goes thru cycles of hurricanes - according to ship registries and historic records, we were in a lull for a while and now return to a long period of more hurricanes. Since the power of these is now double the usual amount (or more), and more property is exposed, and fewer barriers exist since many have been removed or the silt not permitted to dump on the land as used to happen in NOLA and coastal areas - well, basically we should expect a lot of massive hurricanes that we have never seen before.
If you use every single feature and lots of optimizations, and maybe even hack the code yourself, you might be upset at the GUI overlay.
But, if like most people, you just want to use it and not struggle with things, it works fine.
Kind of like how MSFT noticed a lot of people were using WordPad or NotePad because Word had too many darned features that people got lost and they only wanted to write a short note, so they stopped fighting that and stopped making the menus way way too complex.
Most people don't use everything. I've got buttons in my car I've never pressed, for example.
Like this one here marked "Auto Eject". Now, to the casual user you'd think it was one of those James Bond things and if you pressed it you would be ejected from the car, but I know better since they'd never let something like that in a basic sports coupe, so I'll just lean over here... and press it... and... see nothing happened.
[explosion]
[seat ejects]
[seat crashes in pond]
[bubbles appear after poster drowns since he foolishly had his seatbelt on and couldn't get it off after submersion]
That said, even if they are infected with it, it could (and probably is) be a mutation, or they may have made it non-infectious as part of an experiment.
Just cool down and realize that if NJ disappears, it's not like anyone cool ever goes there, just biotech scientists and supermodels...
I'm more worried about virulent diseases being spread nationwide by NOLA refugees, quite frankly, as they were in an interesting biochemical soup for a long period of time in a warm climate... and then spread nationwide without any containment procedures at all.
1). Wireless efficiency. The PC Jr. had a wireless keyboard. Is this thing going to work in a crowded house with lots of peanut butter flying around?
My son has a wavebird wirelass Nintendo controller for his gamecube and it works fine and has never had any problems.
2) Durability. Speaking of which, how hard can you beat on these things? What's the MWBF (Mean Waves Between Failure) on this thing? Are people going to just wave them right into the rubbish bin?
See above - it works fine, never any problems.
3) Endurance. How long can a twelve-year-old boy wave his arms before fatigue sets in? Has anybody done any reasonable studies? What about 30-year-old overweight slashdot nerds longing for their misspent youth?
That's when he should stop playing video games and get back to doing his schoolwork. Seriously, whenever my son says he's tired I have him stop playing, or at least put it on pause and take a break, go take a bath, have lunch, something like that.
4) They are shipping at least two controllers per unit, right? 'cos if there's just one, then designers can't rely on the numchuck configuration.
Nope. Nintendo makes money on their game consoles and their games, so I seriously doubt it will include two controllers.
I suspect the London bombs were triggered via cell phone.
Rubbish. How could they? You can't get a mobile signal on the underground because it's so far underground. The bombs were on timers - at least, they were until the police decided to change the story for reasons known only unto them.
Many underground transit tunnels - and car/truck tunnels - have repeaters nowadays to provide cell phone, emergency signal, and radio services. However, this is not true of all tunnels, only some.
The problem with a cell phone usage map of a tech city, let's say Seattle, is that some neighborhoods have evolved beyond cell phones - and even watches.
I live in Fremont, Center of the Universe [or so our neighborhood is claimed as in many public artworks], which is a neighborhood in Seattle, one of the most heavily wired and unwired neighborhoods with DSL and Cable modem and Gigapops galore. Many of us have ditched our electronic cell phone tethers and gone phoneless - because we don't want to be bothered.
We already have wireless on our blackberry's and/or laptops, or might have a pager at most (which includes a handy digital clock so no watch needed).
But on a map like this we won't be shining brightly even tho we're more wired than the rest of Seattle, just because we can't be bothered by crufty cell phones.
So, realize it's only a map of old-world cell technology and not a map of tech centers, since some ultra-techs are not bothering with clunky cell phones.
Slashdot Mirror
when it regurgitates lawyer-approved marketing speak to gaming fans totally p.ss.ng them off, and is clueless that it did so, as it's grown the bureacracy like the morons in DC have been doing since 2000.
That's what my son does, for the most part, although he does play Diablo II and Starcraft II online at times.
Paper games - he's in an RPG club at Roosevelt High School and they play a lot of AD&D and other paper games.
As I told him, as a SMOG from way back (before Steve Jackson had his computers broken into small bits by the SS, which I'd used at the Worldcon to fix their DBase II con events schedule for panelists, so I really felt his pain, they were sweet), it's all about the Story and the Story Telling. If you do that right, most of the rest doesn't matter.
just like Microsoft's model has them losing BILLIONS on xBox sales to make it up on game sales.
...
Of course, Apple could have chosen to go more Nintendo's route, and make money on the device and the music.
Me, I just love the free Napster subscription for music downloads you can get at the University of Washington
and now it's blogs.
....
Same need met, fairly similar concept, and in those times London and NYC had postal delivery five times a day, allowing one to share notes and such as well.
Mind you, back then that was the technology. This is similar in some ways, but not that surprising.
Next we'll bring back the Jet Pack as personal transportation device, or personal Steam Locomotives (we have a 200+ year supply of coal in the US, even if oil/gas are rapidly disappearing)
doesn't give Firefox the right to fix bugs while the Microsofties are distracted and obvlivious ...
It's also unreported and undisclosed major gaping holes, the ability to automatically run scripts that install viruses and spyware on your laptop, and the clear fact that running IE without security at top levels leads to a compromised PC within minutes on the UW campus, whereas you can run for days with Firefox.
Let's get real, and stop pushing phony statistics.
After all, it was originally imposed on blank recording media - tape, CD-RW, DVD-RW, etc - to pay for the taping by music enthusiasts of album/song broadcasts on radio.
So if they want to make radio music copy-protected, I want a $10,000 refund check. No, better make that in cash - small unmarked bills.
oh, I should say I've done some of the more notable events, like the Alter of the Mystical Frog of the Playa, the Artists Republic of Fremont Passport Office, the Fremont Colonial Expeditionary Alien Passport and Visa Task Force and Travelling Juice Bar, and the Ice Rustlers of the Open Playa.
Personally, I love the theater and the art, and staying up a couple of times to dance all night, but the party thing gets old after the third day or so.
1. Party - this really kicks off with the Thursday crowd that hangs till Sunday - so if you're in party mood, don't go earlier. Or stay home. Yeah, I like that ...
...
2. Art - a lot of the art is more accessible and organic early on, so best seen Tuesday to Saturday - by Saturday afternoon it's way too party to bother.
3. Drugs - not really into that, but if this is your style, then sleep during the afternoon heat and stay up till dawn and you'll have lots of fun - the dancing till dawn part is cool tho and my fave experience was finding my flourescent green artists tube (transparent) when twirled at a giant black light music piece off in the desert with windsocks around - well, it vibrated and the dust from the playa really made it glow like mad - must be the desert salts
but Bay Area yuppies who load up on Burning Man supplies at Costco.
don't forget a lot of people from Seattle too, and Home Depot is useful for rebar, batteries, cheap rugs, and other supplies one needs in the desert.
I know it's already been discussed, but I'll go ahead and say it here for the record. The GameCube failed as a console.
But how can it fail when it was far more profitable than the xBox?
Seriously, doesn't anyone understand Nintendo made money on both games and consoles?
as people like me keep setting Opera to report itself as Firefox pushes up the numbers.
Because, you know, the NEXT TRACK button and ejection button are like, right next to each other.
Nah, NEXT TRACK just makes it change lanes.
When will people learn that this kind of crap will happen with or without human intervention? The Earth has been changing constantly for millions of years and will continue to change past our existence. Holy crap, a climate shift!! I am sure it was the Neanderthals who brought on the ice age by causing nuclear winter. How else could that have happened?
The earth doesn't owe humanity a living. We're just the latest infestation on the surface of it. Species have been eliminated during glaciations or killed off or adapted to other warming cycles, so if we choose to accelerate the speed of the warming cycle, we get the consequences.
And, actually, there were never that many Neanderthals in the first place. Ninety percent of all the people that have ever existed on the earth have existed since WW II.
According to wikipedia, the greenland ice sheet [wikipedia.org], if fully melted, will raise global sea level by 7.2 meters (23.6 feet). This would put large portions of many coastal cities underwater.
One of the reasons we know about temperatures back during glacial ages is that the Greenland Ice Sheet has never melted. Ever.
Parts of it on the coastal areas and southern reaches have melted in part, but most of it has always had snowfall, even during the warmest periods.
So I wouldn't worry about all of it melting, even though I would be concerned of the Arctic and Antartic ice sheets melting rapidly, which is already happening at a rate never before experienced.
1. The energy stored in the Carribean has raised the sea temperature by one degree - and hurricane/storm strength is directly impacted by the heat storage in the sea/ocean.
2. Half of the damage - or more - is caused by the destruction of the surrounding wetlands around cities.
3. Much of the dollar cost of the damage is caused by the anti-environmental building policies that encourage the construction of expensive properties (like those of a certain senator) and their rebuilding after storms and hurricanes. As we provide economic incentives that override the normal economic disincentives, the wealthy move to the coast and build fancy developments that are more exposed, and sink more wealth into coastal areas.
4. The US population on the coast is growing faster than the rest of the country, while the empty areas that are in the middle are emptying out.
5. The quantity of hurricanes of significant level has not increased worldwide, but the strength of those major storms has increased dramatically (double).
6. The Carribean goes thru cycles of hurricanes - according to ship registries and historic records, we were in a lull for a while and now return to a long period of more hurricanes. Since the power of these is now double the usual amount (or more), and more property is exposed, and fewer barriers exist since many have been removed or the silt not permitted to dump on the land as used to happen in NOLA and coastal areas - well, basically we should expect a lot of massive hurricanes that we have never seen before.
If you use every single feature and lots of optimizations, and maybe even hack the code yourself, you might be upset at the GUI overlay.
... and press it ... and ... see nothing happened.
But, if like most people, you just want to use it and not struggle with things, it works fine.
Kind of like how MSFT noticed a lot of people were using WordPad or NotePad because Word had too many darned features that people got lost and they only wanted to write a short note, so they stopped fighting that and stopped making the menus way way too complex.
Most people don't use everything. I've got buttons in my car I've never pressed, for example.
Like this one here marked "Auto Eject". Now, to the casual user you'd think it was one of those James Bond things and if you pressed it you would be ejected from the car, but I know better since they'd never let something like that in a basic sports coupe, so I'll just lean over here
[explosion]
[seat ejects]
[seat crashes in pond]
[bubbles appear after poster drowns since he foolishly had his seatbelt on and couldn't get it off after submersion]
.
ever played the Tetris game version of that, the one that shipped on the Monty Python and the Holy Grail CD? It was amazingly fun!
That said, even if they are infected with it, it could (and probably is) be a mutation, or they may have made it non-infectious as part of an experiment.
...
... and then spread nationwide without any containment procedures at all.
Just cool down and realize that if NJ disappears, it's not like anyone cool ever goes there, just biotech scientists and supermodels
I'm more worried about virulent diseases being spread nationwide by NOLA refugees, quite frankly, as they were in an interesting biochemical soup for a long period of time in a warm climate
You have a glowtube that sparkles and shines more as you wave it with your arm(s), while you dance on the pad or wear the special dance shoes.
This would be oh so very awesome and fun. Especially when you turn the lights out and it glows in the dark too.
Party time!
I can guarantee they'll be offering a controller like that for DDR2/3 on the new Nintendo Revolution, as the fun level would be off the scale!
1). Wireless efficiency. The PC Jr. had a wireless keyboard. Is this thing going to work in a crowded house with lots of peanut butter flying around?
My son has a wavebird wirelass Nintendo controller for his gamecube and it works fine and has never had any problems.
2) Durability. Speaking of which, how hard can you beat on these things? What's the MWBF (Mean Waves Between Failure) on this thing? Are people going to just wave them right into the rubbish bin?
See above - it works fine, never any problems.
3) Endurance. How long can a twelve-year-old boy wave his arms before fatigue sets in? Has anybody done any reasonable studies? What about 30-year-old overweight slashdot nerds longing for their misspent youth?
That's when he should stop playing video games and get back to doing his schoolwork. Seriously, whenever my son says he's tired I have him stop playing, or at least put it on pause and take a break, go take a bath, have lunch, something like that.
4) They are shipping at least two controllers per unit, right? 'cos if there's just one, then designers can't rely on the numchuck configuration.
Nope. Nintendo makes money on their game consoles and their games, so I seriously doubt it will include two controllers.
Wait a goddamned minute. Since when does *not having a cellphone* make you COOLer??!!?? Is that all it takes these days?
Sorry, you snooze you looze.
It's like being vegan - that was hot ten years ago, but now it's old school.
Now, if you were from the planetary system Vega, now that would be hot.
I suspect the London bombs were triggered via cell phone.
Rubbish. How could they? You can't get a mobile signal on the underground because it's so far underground. The bombs were on timers - at least, they were until the police decided to change the story for reasons known only unto them.
Many underground transit tunnels - and car/truck tunnels - have repeaters nowadays to provide cell phone, emergency signal, and radio services. However, this is not true of all tunnels, only some.
because real coders write in pseudo-code first, and diagram, and when they code it's on their laptop at the coffee shop down the street.
The problem with a cell phone usage map of a tech city, let's say Seattle, is that some neighborhoods have evolved beyond cell phones - and even watches.
I live in Fremont, Center of the Universe [or so our neighborhood is claimed as in many public artworks], which is a neighborhood in Seattle, one of the most heavily wired and unwired neighborhoods with DSL and Cable modem and Gigapops galore. Many of us have ditched our electronic cell phone tethers and gone phoneless - because we don't want to be bothered.
We already have wireless on our blackberry's and/or laptops, or might have a pager at most (which includes a handy digital clock so no watch needed).
But on a map like this we won't be shining brightly even tho we're more wired than the rest of Seattle, just because we can't be bothered by crufty cell phones.
So, realize it's only a map of old-world cell technology and not a map of tech centers, since some ultra-techs are not bothering with clunky cell phones.