How would a project, that would clearly earn a rating of AO, be green lighted when they know that such games cannot be released on the systems they created it for?
Clearly earn an AO? In the past, AO ratings have been reserved for games that are pornographic or have real money gambling. Manhunt2 is the first game that I know of that was rated AO simply because of violence. It's not unreasonable to think that Take Two didn't realize that the game would get an AO, considering there is no porn, and from what I've seen from gameplay videos, it's really not that much worse than the first game.
Or they could have just accidentally selected the wrong moderation. If you're using the "new discussion system," there's no way to undo a moderation after you select it from the drop down menu. I know I've done that once or twice in the past, although usually I'll just reply to the post to undo it.
It's perfectly fine to make fun of Jesus... but god forbid you make fun of Muhammad...
I just remember that south park episode where comedy central refused to show peter griffin handing Mohammed a football, but 30 seconds later, they showed Bush and Jesus taking a crap on an American flag. Hypocrisy much?
The issue the Utah legislators are against is (the following example is fictitious) Sony buying keyword advertisements for the "XBOX" keyword - in hopes of getting them to buy PS3s instead. The idea behind the law is that, in this example, Microsoft own the XBOX trademark, and by Sony buying ads for "XBOX", they are 'benefiting from another person's trademark'. Or something like that. To be more specific, it might be the case the Sony pay more, and people typing "XBOX" see ads for Sony, and not Microsoft. The legislators see that as "hijacking a trademark".
One of the major problems that i see with that is what happens when trademarks become so closely associated with the product that people refer to the product by the trademark. I know a number of people who xerox a document, get a kleenex to blow their nose, or go to the park to play catch with a frisbee. (all of the bolded words are trademarks of a particular company, although many people use them to refer to the generic object.)
If i search the internet for frisbees, should Wham-O be the only ones allowed to advertise on that page? I think that's taking things slightly too far.
Well, i caved and glanced at TFA, and when you actually read it, looks like i'm wrong and it really is just a modified King of the Hill type game. So yeah, disregard that. Should have known the summary would be misleading.
According to the summary (I haven't read TFA, but who does?), this isn't the same as king of the hill/SW:B, because it looks like as soon as you "acquire" an objective, your team gets the point for that objective and then a new objective appears and the first objective point is pretty much forgotten. So rather than basing the entire game around a couple points on the map (either one point, or a bunch of different points at the same time), which is very common in a lot of games, you'll be concentrating on one point at a time, but as soon as a team "wins" that acquire point, the focus of the game will shift to a new point on the map. I think I've seen it in a couple games before, but it's nowhere near as common as the king of the hill type game you're talking about.
I assume this could probably be most interesting if you have an objective point in a very open area with little cover and a lot of cover around it, so that it's hard to get into the objective point while there is someone guarding it and you have to hunt down the guards in order to really claim it.
Grand theft auto 1 and 2 were 2-d top down view games released on the playstation and PC (and dreamcast in the case of GTA2). GTA3 refers to the 3d game released on playstation 2. Vice City, San Andreas, and all the PSP games the other games that came after GTA3, while they may be sequels, did not recieve a number designation.
I suppose the major difference that gets GTA:IV its own number designation is the vastly improved graphics engine over all the GTA3 games.
Currently, there is a discrepancy between the rotations of galaxies, and what newtons law says should happen. If you look at large galaxies, at a bunch of different radii, all the stars orbits are at about a constant orbital velocity, which since there is less force acting on them from gravity, shouldn't happen.
The most common physical explanation of why this happens is that there is a ring of dark matter around the galaxies that is also producing a gravitational force, and that when you add in the force from the dark matter, the equations work out, and you calculate that the orbital velocities should be constant.
However, there are some physicists who don't like the idea of dark matter, and in order to explain how galaxies orbit, introduced a new version of newton's second law. F = m * f(a/a0)*a, where a0 is a new fundamental constant describing a small acceleration level where these new Newtonian dynamics hold. and f(x) is a function that equals x when x > 1. This theory describes the constant angular orbit speed of galaxies without the need for the existence of dark matter, however, the theory has problems when applied to relativistic systems.
What it looks like this new paper proposes to do is find a place on earth where the acceleration from the coriolis effect, the centripital acceleration and the acceleration from the sun will all cancel out, and then create a really small force and see if the modified second law works for a very small absolute acceleration.
Is it me or does this seem really bad if you know... use more then one computer. Is there a.dat or something I can stick on a thumb drive and take with me?
How do you recover from a hard drive failure?
The only think I can think of that would be more work then identiy theift is loosing acess to every single web account I have. I guess you could get around that by using only one e-mail account and just having a secure password there.
According to that site, it creates your per site password based on a hash function that takes a master password and the url of the site you're logging into as arguments. That's portable to multiple computers and lasts over harddrive failures (as long as the same plug in is installed). The problem I see with it though is how you register for sites where the registration and sign in are a different url so you have to be careful to play with the settings and make sure you don't register with a garbage password.
However, using a different password for each site you use is definitely a lot better than what a lot of people are doing currently, and that plug in is an easy way to do it.
For most standardized tests (In the untited states at least), such as AP exams and College board tests (SAT, SAT IIs, etc), The litmus test for "is a calculator allowed or not" is whether it has a QWERTY keyboard. The Ti-92 has a qwerty keyboard, and isn't allowed.
Realizing this, Texas Instruments essentially released the exact same software, only without the QWERTY keyboard on the -89. Basically, unless you need to have the QWERTY keyboard for some reason, I'd go with the -89, simply because you can use it on the standardized tests.
That's what the issue is... according to TFA, that's the argument the US is trying to use: "We have a right to protect the morality of our citizens."
What Antigua is saying, however, is that online gambling is NOT restricted in the US (i.e. betting on horse races, state lotteries, etc. are all legal) and that to ban online gambling by foreign countries while still allowing local companies the right to let people bet online is an unfair restriction of trade. I tend to agree with Antigua, and the WTO has as well.
For Borat, at least, I don't really find him acting stupid to be the funny part, what's funny is the interactions he has with americans. The fact that he can get James Broadwater to admit on air that he believes all jews are going to hell is hilarious. The fact that some people can actually believe that a guy from Kazakhstan would try to sell his pubic hair after he ran out of money is also hilarious.
To me at least, the talking about backwater Kazakhstan, it's amusing... but the real gold is when he talks about it to other people and they show their ignorance
Currently, In the United States, the litmus test for whether something is considered free speech is whether it would cause an "imminent lawless action" (Brandenburg v. Ohio). This has been taken to mean that it's okay to advocate abstract violence or breaking the law, but as soon as you start encouraging specific actions in a time frame sooner than police officers can be reasonably summoned, It's not constitutionally protected speech amymore. Inciting a riot probably falls under that category. The original case dealt with a KKK rally in Ohio, and the ruling stated that it was acceptible to promote hate against minorities, as long as the speech didn't cause an"imminent lawless action."
I think if this happened in the United States, it would have been constitutionally protected speech. We have those crazy people who show up at soldiers' funerals protesting the war with their "GOD HATES FAGS" signs, and they're allowed to do that. So I think this is a case where British Laws just happen to be more strict on something like this.
The thing is, the kids who did get in were lying anyways. Everyone who wanted to register had to check a box saying that A) They were over 13, and B) they read the terms of service. My guess is that the Xanga designers thought that that was a good enough age check, and they didn't bother writing in code that actually checked the date of birth entered, because the users were already affirming that they were over 13 by checking the box.
Basically the FTC is saying that Xanga needs to make sure the kids are smart enough to lie in 2 different places (both by checking the box saying that they are over 13 and entering a fake date of birth), and because they didn't do that they should have to pay a fine. The solution of forcing the under 13 year olds to lie about their birthdate really doesn't solve anything at all... I know that i personally just used a fake birthdate when I was registering for over 18 sites as a kid, and there's really not going to be anything stopping the under 13 crowd from lying about their age as well.
A known percentage of divisors will produce repeating numbers. For example, any division of 3,5,7,11.... in base 2 will be repeating. Any division of 3,7,11,13... in base 10 will be repeating.
To clarify, any rational number with a divisor that has a different prime factor than the base you're working with (i.e. any number whose prime factorization has numbers other than 2's and 5's in base 10) will be a repeating decimal.
Which is why we should move to a base 60 decimal system! Much fewer annoying repeating decimals.;)
Now, to think of 50 more symbols we can use as digits.
No, but what the Grokster decision did do was make a statement about intent.
"[O]ne who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties."
I'm not sure about other people, but when I hear Limewire being discussed with my friends, 99.9% of the time, it's being discussed as a way to download copyrighted music/songs/etc. I don't know whether the makers of Limewire have made "affirmative steps to foster infringement" but they certainly don't seem to be doing much to change their image as "a program to get music and movies" (at least among the college age crowd i hang out with).
The issue here is whether Limewire is encouraging users to share copyrighted material. Part of the reason that the supreme court ruled against grokster was that they didn't make any effort to filter out copyrighted software and they profited by having a lagre userbase and selling advertisement and illegal downloads increased their userbase. I don't really see Limewire doing anything different. Personally, I think the RIAA has a case here, at least according to the Grokster decision.
In Germany the roads were designed with much higher speeds in mind, and are kept in much better repair than US interstates, which were designed (outside of an urban area) for maximum speeds of 65-75 mph. In the early 70s, when there was an energy crisis, there were studies done that the cars of the time were much more fuel efficient when only traveling at 55 mph. So, fedral legislation was enacted requiring states to lower their speed limits to 55 mph (if they wanted to receive fedral highway funds). After raising the limit a couple of times, in 1995, Congress gave full authority to the states to determine their own speed limits, and some states keep it lower for fuel/environmental reasons.
Germany also does a much better job at making sure the roads are well maintained. If you're going 120+ mph, and you hit a stretch where the road isn't completely smooth and there may be some pot holes.
Another reason is that Germany has laws regarding driving habits. You're not allowed to pass on the right, nor are you allowed to drive for extended periods in the left lane, and you can actually get fined if you're caught doing so. Until they actually put in some driving laws like this in the US, not having a speed limit is not something that's going to happen any time soon.
According to wikipedia, the MLA handbook is one of the few that says that you always need the extra S. Most of the grammar guides i've seen say that either one is acceptible. (I remember looking it up a couple years ago when i had to write a paper on Jesus, and kept running into the same problem. I ended up using Jesus' and nobody commented.)
However, There are a bunch of rules in English grammar that either really are obsolete, or just nobody cares about the rules and whil you would probably find them in a grammar style guide, honestly, it doesn't matter in spoken or casual english. Some examples are:
The verb "to be" taking a direct object:
"Who is it?" "It's just me" (Should be "It is I")
Who/Whom:
"Is that the guy who you saw" (should be "whom you saw")
Use of "they" as a gender neutral singular pronoun
The entire subjunctive mood
Splitting Infinitives.
There are plenty more. Basically, what i'm saying is that English grammar and usage of words really only depends on whether it's acceptible in whatever community you're writing for to use whatever grammar you want. As far as I'm concerned. Using Jobs' is correct, and gets the meaning accross, so i don't have an issue with it.
As somone who just went through a couple intro to programming classes (stupid university not giving me credit for them), i have to agree that this approach is probably the best one out there.
The very first experiance everyone has with code here is simple text-editor/command line, coding, compliling, and running. After about a week-ish of writing simple "hello world" programs, they are introducted to a relatively bare bones compilor JCreator (basically it has syntax highlighting, auto-indentation, and project building, but you still have to compile the code and wade through the error results yourself.)
After students passed that semester of basic coding, the next semester introduced IDE's with more features, like eclipse, which does fix simple errors for you and basically make the coding go faster so the students get a more general view on whatever is being taught.
It seemed to me this philosophy worked the best, when students were just learning, they had to figure out what was wrong and catch it on their own, but as they got more proficient, they were given tools that did the basic stuff for them.
The fact is, google plainly has the ability to filter out stuff from the google suggest toolbar... if you don't believe me, go into google suggest and try typing in the name of a famous celebrity. Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Anna Kournikova... whoever you type in, you won't get one suggestion that's ovbiously innapropriate, and i gaurentee, that's something a lot of people are searching google for.
Google can and does have the ability to filter out search terms like "britney spears naked" and other offensive terms like that. And in response to all of the people who say stuff like "crack" has plenty of legitimate uses, i would argue that the word "naked" and/or "nude" has just as many legitimate uses, and google suggest filters them out.
Anyways, i completely agree with what they are saying... I have no problem with google trying to use google to search for illegal software, but when they are trying to search for legal software, and google suggests to search for illegal software, that is a problem... IMO, google should be able to filter it out the same way they do for pornographic results from the google suggest bar.
And, as you point out, the name doesn't factor into the "buy/don't buy" decision-making process. The novelty, quality of games, and price will do that. The name is there mainly to help draw attention and curiosity, and it's doing a bang-up job of that so far.
Actually, among some of my less intelligent friends (read: the image conscious ones, and the ones who play only the 'cool' video games) have specifically said that they're never going to buy anything called the wii. While i'm not sure how many of those there are, there definitly are some shallow people who will refuse to buy a game because the name isn't cool enough. Nintendo already has an image of being kiddy and not the best among many teen gamers, do they really want the fact that kids who buy wiis will be called 'Wiiners' by their friends to be another discouragement...
I remember one of the comments about the new name was how amusing it would be watching all the rabid nintendo fanboys come up with reasons how the name was good... and i admit, they do have it right. Personally, i'm still going to buy one, despite the fact that I think the name is god awful. But i can't help but think that the name does turn people off to the console overall.
The fact is, regardless of how good the console is, nintendo is going to have to be able to market the console, and IMO, the name of a console makes a huge first impression. When consumers see a name that needs explination to figure out how to pronounce it, needs explination to figure out what it means, and once you have that explination, sounds like a 10 year old's slang term for urine, there's going to be a large number of them who go "wtf" and never even bother with the console
Plus, there are people who are fickle like that, i know a couple kids who won't buy a gamecube because it's not cool. You think that they're going to pick up something that's going to get their friends are going to start calling them a "wiiner."
People can say that the name doesn't make a difference in how good a console is all they want, but the fact is, the name is very important for marketing, and personally, the name wii can aonly hurt marketing IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
Or they could have just accidentally selected the wrong moderation. If you're using the "new discussion system," there's no way to undo a moderation after you select it from the drop down menu. I know I've done that once or twice in the past, although usually I'll just reply to the post to undo it.
It's perfectly fine to make fun of Jesus... but god forbid you make fun of Muhammad ...
I just remember that south park episode where comedy central refused to show peter griffin handing Mohammed a football, but 30 seconds later, they showed Bush and Jesus taking a crap on an American flag. Hypocrisy much?
For non-positive integer inputs, the factorial function generalizes to the Gamma function. That's how you get stuff like 0! = 1 and (.5)! = sqrt(pi)/2
One of the major problems that i see with that is what happens when trademarks become so closely associated with the product that people refer to the product by the trademark. I know a number of people who xerox a document, get a kleenex to blow their nose, or go to the park to play catch with a frisbee. (all of the bolded words are trademarks of a particular company, although many people use them to refer to the generic object.)
If i search the internet for frisbees, should Wham-O be the only ones allowed to advertise on that page? I think that's taking things slightly too far.Well, i caved and glanced at TFA, and when you actually read it, looks like i'm wrong and it really is just a modified King of the Hill type game. So yeah, disregard that. Should have known the summary would be misleading.
According to the summary (I haven't read TFA, but who does?), this isn't the same as king of the hill/SW:B, because it looks like as soon as you "acquire" an objective, your team gets the point for that objective and then a new objective appears and the first objective point is pretty much forgotten. So rather than basing the entire game around a couple points on the map (either one point, or a bunch of different points at the same time), which is very common in a lot of games, you'll be concentrating on one point at a time, but as soon as a team "wins" that acquire point, the focus of the game will shift to a new point on the map. I think I've seen it in a couple games before, but it's nowhere near as common as the king of the hill type game you're talking about.
I assume this could probably be most interesting if you have an objective point in a very open area with little cover and a lot of cover around it, so that it's hard to get into the objective point while there is someone guarding it and you have to hunt down the guards in order to really claim it.
Grand theft auto 1 and 2 were 2-d top down view games released on the playstation and PC (and dreamcast in the case of GTA2). GTA3 refers to the 3d game released on playstation 2. Vice City, San Andreas, and all the PSP games the other games that came after GTA3, while they may be sequels, did not recieve a number designation.
I suppose the major difference that gets GTA:IV its own number designation is the vastly improved graphics engine over all the GTA3 games.
Currently, there is a discrepancy between the rotations of galaxies, and what newtons law says should happen. If you look at large galaxies, at a bunch of different radii, all the stars orbits are at about a constant orbital velocity, which since there is less force acting on them from gravity, shouldn't happen.
The most common physical explanation of why this happens is that there is a ring of dark matter around the galaxies that is also producing a gravitational force, and that when you add in the force from the dark matter, the equations work out, and you calculate that the orbital velocities should be constant.
However, there are some physicists who don't like the idea of dark matter, and in order to explain how galaxies orbit, introduced a new version of newton's second law. F = m * f(a/a0)*a, where a0 is a new fundamental constant describing a small acceleration level where these new Newtonian dynamics hold. and f(x) is a function that equals x when x > 1. This theory describes the constant angular orbit speed of galaxies without the need for the existence of dark matter, however, the theory has problems when applied to relativistic systems.
What it looks like this new paper proposes to do is find a place on earth where the acceleration from the coriolis effect, the centripital acceleration and the acceleration from the sun will all cancel out, and then create a really small force and see if the modified second law works for a very small absolute acceleration.
According to that site, it creates your per site password based on a hash function that takes a master password and the url of the site you're logging into as arguments. That's portable to multiple computers and lasts over harddrive failures (as long as the same plug in is installed). The problem I see with it though is how you register for sites where the registration and sign in are a different url so you have to be careful to play with the settings and make sure you don't register with a garbage password.
However, using a different password for each site you use is definitely a lot better than what a lot of people are doing currently, and that plug in is an easy way to do it.
For most standardized tests (In the untited states at least), such as AP exams and College board tests (SAT, SAT IIs, etc), The litmus test for "is a calculator allowed or not" is whether it has a QWERTY keyboard. The Ti-92 has a qwerty keyboard, and isn't allowed.
Realizing this, Texas Instruments essentially released the exact same software, only without the QWERTY keyboard on the -89. Basically, unless you need to have the QWERTY keyboard for some reason, I'd go with the -89, simply because you can use it on the standardized tests.
That's what the issue is... according to TFA, that's the argument the US is trying to use: "We have a right to protect the morality of our citizens."
What Antigua is saying, however, is that online gambling is NOT restricted in the US (i.e. betting on horse races, state lotteries, etc. are all legal) and that to ban online gambling by foreign countries while still allowing local companies the right to let people bet online is an unfair restriction of trade. I tend to agree with Antigua, and the WTO has as well.
According to the in game loading screen in Guitar Hero 2, Accordion Hero is coming out in 2008 ;)
For Borat, at least, I don't really find him acting stupid to be the funny part, what's funny is the interactions he has with americans. The fact that he can get James Broadwater to admit on air that he believes all jews are going to hell is hilarious. The fact that some people can actually believe that a guy from Kazakhstan would try to sell his pubic hair after he ran out of money is also hilarious.
To me at least, the talking about backwater Kazakhstan, it's amusing... but the real gold is when he talks about it to other people and they show their ignorance
Currently, In the United States, the litmus test for whether something is considered free speech is whether it would cause an "imminent lawless action" (Brandenburg v. Ohio). This has been taken to mean that it's okay to advocate abstract violence or breaking the law, but as soon as you start encouraging specific actions in a time frame sooner than police officers can be reasonably summoned, It's not constitutionally protected speech amymore. Inciting a riot probably falls under that category. The original case dealt with a KKK rally in Ohio, and the ruling stated that it was acceptible to promote hate against minorities, as long as the speech didn't cause an"imminent lawless action."
I think if this happened in the United States, it would have been constitutionally protected speech. We have those crazy people who show up at soldiers' funerals protesting the war with their "GOD HATES FAGS" signs, and they're allowed to do that. So I think this is a case where British Laws just happen to be more strict on something like this.
The thing is, the kids who did get in were lying anyways. Everyone who wanted to register had to check a box saying that A) They were over 13, and B) they read the terms of service. My guess is that the Xanga designers thought that that was a good enough age check, and they didn't bother writing in code that actually checked the date of birth entered, because the users were already affirming that they were over 13 by checking the box.
Basically the FTC is saying that Xanga needs to make sure the kids are smart enough to lie in 2 different places (both by checking the box saying that they are over 13 and entering a fake date of birth), and because they didn't do that they should have to pay a fine. The solution of forcing the under 13 year olds to lie about their birthdate really doesn't solve anything at all... I know that i personally just used a fake birthdate when I was registering for over 18 sites as a kid, and there's really not going to be anything stopping the under 13 crowd from lying about their age as well.
To clarify, any rational number with a divisor that has a different prime factor than the base you're working with (i.e. any number whose prime factorization has numbers other than 2's and 5's in base 10) will be a repeating decimal.
Which is why we should move to a base 60 decimal system! Much fewer annoying repeating decimals. ;)
Now, to think of 50 more symbols we can use as digits.
No, but what the Grokster decision did do was make a statement about intent.
I'm not sure about other people, but when I hear Limewire being discussed with my friends, 99.9% of the time, it's being discussed as a way to download copyrighted music/songs/etc. I don't know whether the makers of Limewire have made "affirmative steps to foster infringement" but they certainly don't seem to be doing much to change their image as "a program to get music and movies" (at least among the college age crowd i hang out with).
The issue here is whether Limewire is encouraging users to share copyrighted material. Part of the reason that the supreme court ruled against grokster was that they didn't make any effort to filter out copyrighted software and they profited by having a lagre userbase and selling advertisement and illegal downloads increased their userbase. I don't really see Limewire doing anything different. Personally, I think the RIAA has a case here, at least according to the Grokster decision.
It's a combination of a bunch of things.
In Germany the roads were designed with much higher speeds in mind, and are kept in much better repair than US interstates, which were designed (outside of an urban area) for maximum speeds of 65-75 mph. In the early 70s, when there was an energy crisis, there were studies done that the cars of the time were much more fuel efficient when only traveling at 55 mph. So, fedral legislation was enacted requiring states to lower their speed limits to 55 mph (if they wanted to receive fedral highway funds). After raising the limit a couple of times, in 1995, Congress gave full authority to the states to determine their own speed limits, and some states keep it lower for fuel/environmental reasons.
Germany also does a much better job at making sure the roads are well maintained. If you're going 120+ mph, and you hit a stretch where the road isn't completely smooth and there may be some pot holes.
Another reason is that Germany has laws regarding driving habits. You're not allowed to pass on the right, nor are you allowed to drive for extended periods in the left lane, and you can actually get fined if you're caught doing so. Until they actually put in some driving laws like this in the US, not having a speed limit is not something that's going to happen any time soon.
However, There are a bunch of rules in English grammar that either really are obsolete, or just nobody cares about the rules and whil you would probably find them in a grammar style guide, honestly, it doesn't matter in spoken or casual english. Some examples are:
The verb "to be" taking a direct object:
Who/Whom:
Use of "they" as a gender neutral singular pronoun
The entire subjunctive mood
Splitting Infinitives.
There are plenty more. Basically, what i'm saying is that English grammar and usage of words really only depends on whether it's acceptible in whatever community you're writing for to use whatever grammar you want. As far as I'm concerned. Using Jobs' is correct, and gets the meaning accross, so i don't have an issue with it.
The very first experiance everyone has with code here is simple text-editor/command line, coding, compliling, and running. After about a week-ish of writing simple "hello world" programs, they are introducted to a relatively bare bones compilor JCreator (basically it has syntax highlighting, auto-indentation, and project building, but you still have to compile the code and wade through the error results yourself.)
After students passed that semester of basic coding, the next semester introduced IDE's with more features, like eclipse, which does fix simple errors for you and basically make the coding go faster so the students get a more general view on whatever is being taught.
It seemed to me this philosophy worked the best, when students were just learning, they had to figure out what was wrong and catch it on their own, but as they got more proficient, they were given tools that did the basic stuff for them.
yay for f'ing up the link in my post! I rock!
Google can and does have the ability to filter out search terms like "britney spears naked" and other offensive terms like that. And in response to all of the people who say stuff like "crack" has plenty of legitimate uses, i would argue that the word "naked" and/or "nude" has just as many legitimate uses, and google suggest filters them out.
Anyways, i completely agree with what they are saying... I have no problem with google trying to use google to search for illegal software, but when they are trying to search for legal software, and google suggests to search for illegal software, that is a problem... IMO, google should be able to filter it out the same way they do for pornographic results from the google suggest bar.
Actually, among some of my less intelligent friends (read: the image conscious ones, and the ones who play only the 'cool' video games) have specifically said that they're never going to buy anything called the wii. While i'm not sure how many of those there are, there definitly are some shallow people who will refuse to buy a game because the name isn't cool enough. Nintendo already has an image of being kiddy and not the best among many teen gamers, do they really want the fact that kids who buy wiis will be called 'Wiiners' by their friends to be another discouragement...
I remember one of the comments about the new name was how amusing it would be watching all the rabid nintendo fanboys come up with reasons how the name was good... and i admit, they do have it right. Personally, i'm still going to buy one, despite the fact that I think the name is god awful. But i can't help but think that the name does turn people off to the console overall.
Plus, there are people who are fickle like that, i know a couple kids who won't buy a gamecube because it's not cool. You think that they're going to pick up something that's going to get their friends are going to start calling them a "wiiner."
People can say that the name doesn't make a difference in how good a console is all they want, but the fact is, the name is very important for marketing, and personally, the name wii can aonly hurt marketing IMO.