But you do have to consider who's losing out and what consequences it will have. Metroid Prime is a great game, and that was known at the time. We all want to see a whole lot more games by retro studio. But did you know that Metroid Prime 2 didn't do particularly well considering it's deserved credit?
Whithout sales (new sales) publishers make less profit, and the creative developers are forced to concentrate more on profits than making great games. And the best way to do that quickly is to flood the market with annual sports updates and movie-based games.
If everyone would have thought like you when it came to Super Metroid, there would be no Metroid Prime.
I'll try to keep objective when writing this comment, but I am frustrated by people who clearly have no idea of what they are talking about, and try to apply their "knowledge" to existing technologies.
Of course you would have to use energy to melt snow off panels. And obviously you won't want to use it if the energy gain isn't larger. But by melting a thin layer at the bottom, you would have a flat, wet surface, which would cause the rest of the snow to slide off. Whether or not it's worth it could be easily calculated by measuring the sunlight and considering the sunlight hours left in a day.
These systems do actually work in winter in cold climates, if maybe not quite so effectively. The reason is that you are using the actual sunlight to heat water, so it doesn't matter what air temperture you have. And when insulated properly, you will have very little energy loss.
Of course you will have less gain in winter, but you are forgetting that people use significant amounts of hot water in summer. This is where you would see the most gain, and you do not need to be in a hot climate to use it. Where I live, there are quite a few people who have solar panels on their houses, and it's not a very hot climate. Solar heating has proven itself possible, and economical in most populated climates. Fact.
I certainly go to news sites I never would have in the past because of a link from Google News
Which is exactly what the big news sites don't want. They want you to keep comeing to their sites no matter how bad or expensive their services are, because you don't know where to find a good alternative.
Sure a mortgage is a loan, what else? It is meant to help normal people pay for larger investments, such as property. If you think you haven't got enough money to pay for such an investment, then that's up to you I guess. (I can't see why you would have two mortgages on a hundred-year-old house that hasn't had any work done in decades anyway)
Depending on what you investment is, it isn't that hard to get a loan for such investments though.
The GDP per capita in the US is about $40k a year BTW.
Alot of poeple can afford it, and alot of people do. If you seriously can't afford to have some work done on your house, then you're a bit of a minority. Ask around. I bet you won't find it too hard to find someone who bought a house in the past few years, or had something done like had a new heating system installed. Work and investments like that are completely normal. Everyone does it, and it isn't only something for the obscenely rich.
If you're getting other things done, why not grab the chance and make an investment for the future and coming energy-prices?
You will acutally be saving money in the long term.
As for snow, it could be easily removed by pumping heated water through the panels, which would cause the snow to slide off the flat surface. Or it could be done by automatic brushes. Not a mojor problem.
Coming back to practicality, as I said, solar panels are within the financial reach of the average home owner. And wind turbines aren't meant for private households anway. But placing large wind-farms in windy areas can produce electricity cheaply and easily.
BTW, I did mean to say "whinging", the british word.
The massacre is not being put in a positive light.
I never said it was. They were putting the situation and history of the square in a positive light.
For example, Germany and Japan were countries who were enemies of the United States during World War II. Today we embrace those countries and cultures--we don't associate them with "evil". Those events are not part of how we perceive those countries, and we don't associate them with that anymore.
Yes we do. Practically all their foreign policies and interest are closely watched, and any kind of international representation is hard.
They know that they're associated with their past, and accept it.
Of course the people who live in Japan or Germany aren't evil, and shouldn't be descriminated against or insulted (although that does happen alot), because they were "unlucky" enough to have the wrong leaders, or have the wrong people come to power (and that can happen anywhere).
They are as good as any other human beings.
But denying their past, or pretending it never happened is unacceptable (holocaust denial is a crime in Germany). That is exactly what China is doing though.
The history of Germany would also look a little prettier without a genocide of six-million in it, don't you think?
I'd certainly call that putting something in a positive light.
Depending on the construction, it might be hard to access.
What I should have said is that it wouldn't be too hard to keep clean. The surfaces are so flat that the snow would easily slide off, and could easily be done automatically where it's an issue.
But the angle of the roof would probably be enough for it to slide of by itself. The simplist solution would be to pump warm water through the panels, which would make the snow slide off.
How a comment like this could be mederated informative is beyond me.
It's just a load of whinging.
If you don't want to invest in Solar heating, that's your choice. They do actually pay for themselves within a few years though. Just don't be complaining you can't afford the oil in years to come. It's not unusual for people to renew their heating systems, and remortgage their house to get work done.
As for snow, have you heard of an invention called a brush?
And wind power isn't meant for personal use any more than fusion reactors. It's up to you to support it and maybe a little public initiative. Nobody's expecting you to put up a 300-foot turbine in your backyard.
Both technologies have proven themselves very praticable.
You don't have to create positive "information" to put something in a positive light. Censoring anything negative about something, only leaving the positive, can surely be seen as the definition of bias.
What happened at Tiananmen changed the way it would be percieved forever. It might not have been built on evil, or for the sake evil. But it is now associated with violent supression, and evil. It is part of what is now Tiananmen. Cutting out those parts is manipulating the truth about the place as a whole, and putting it in a positive light.
I'm not agreeing with the grandparent that it should give no results at all, but it doesn't make it any better that they "simply don't mention it".
Wow, I've never seen such extensive use of the word "wire"
If you're prepared to spend $30 on the Nintendo WiFi adapter, $50 for a router isn't gonna kill you.
The Adapter is meant for people who don't have a wireless network set up, and don't have the knowledge to do so efficiently.
With your knowledge, I wouldn't have thought a non-WPA handheld would cause so much problems.
Of course you can take measures to protect yourself. But it's your choice if you want to do it the easy way, or the hard way. Of course, if you're not intersted in playing the DS online, that's a wholly different matter.
Finally, I have the $30 Nintendo USB adapter. It sucks. See other post.
The buy yourself an access point for $50, lock the MAC adress, and use it for your DS.
Security really isn't an issue here.
And if all you're sensetive traffic goes through wires anyway, where's the problem?
I just posted a similar comment up above, but just for the sake of it:
Nuclear power is potentially very safe, just as it's potentially very dangerous. Depending on how carefully you store it, and use it.
Although it is safe in normal operation, things can always go wrong, and they do. Even if the risks are small, a largescale accident could wipe out populations and make huge areas uninhanitable for decades.
The differnce to coal is that you've got highly concentrated radioactive waste, which you want to store in one place. Even if you don't mean it to go anywhere, it's just sitting there posing a potential hazard.
The radiation released by coal is not that significant, and blends into background levels. And I agree with you that there is alot of misinformation about radioactivity. People don't realise just how radioactive volcanoes are, for example.
But the way it's handled is what makes nuclear power so dangerous, and that's the reason so many people oppose it.
It's not a problem of putting out radioactive material into the environment so much as the dangers involved with storing and handling the highly-concentrated stuff we get from nucear power. If you can be sure that the waste will be stored with care at proper facilities with no leakage problems, then there's not much of a problem. But as long as there are kilograms of waste "disappearing" from these facilities all the time, I'd opt for coal anyday.
Even if the risks are small, a largescale accident would have huge impact and could make huge areas uninhabitable for decades.
It doesn't need antigravity, but just a force to counteract the gravitaional force. If you can't tell the difference, you should take a physics course.
As you correctly point out, an upward force is only exerted when the magnets are moving. Because the gravitational force is constant, and the inductive force increases with the velocity, there will be a point when they cancel each other out and the elevator will drift downward with a constant velocity.
This speed can easily be adapted by changing the resistance in the circuitry. If it's still to fast, additional rotary generators could mounted to the car.
To stop the car completely and hold it in place, you're going to need mechanical brakes.
Why do you think that a maglev elevator would require no power to move down? Unless of course you mean freefall. But if you want to go down in a controlled fashion you still have to exert an upward force, just not quite so much as to completely overcome gravity.
Because no energy is needed. You let it drift down, which will be slower than freefall because of the impedence of the magnetic generator. But yes, it is theoretically falling.
Technically you also exert an upward force, which will be the "friction" whilst falling. But force doesn't equal energy, but rather the product of force and distance does. Because the distance is negative (you're going down) you use negative energy, i.e. you can actually harvest energy from the system.
Microsoft has annual revenues of 40 billion a year. The EU has an annual budget of around 100 billion a year. I'd say they're prety much th same league.
No they are not. They are like books or dvd's. Mostly used once and then sold, but if enjoyed on the first 'usage' then re-used and lent to friends. And this leads to the 'shared' experience that gets people talking about them.
Did I say anything against re-using games or lending them to freinds? The biggest problem is the kind of mass-throughput and organised cycling of games like we know from ebay and EB-games.
The only examples you give are books and DVDs.
Books are cheap as shit, so most people would rather spend the two extra bucks not to have it covered in old food, sweat stains and creased spines.
DVDs have a completely different market situation. Most people who only want to watch the movie once will rent it, whereby the publisher does recieve a part ov the revenue. It is actually quite a lucrative business for less successful films.
Also the argument of selling an experience or service is a strange way of looking at games in my opinion.
I never said that they were selling a service, and not the game. Of course it's yours when you buy it, to play and re-use and enjoy with your freinds as much as you like.
But it is debatable whether it's right to sell it on afterwards and thus undermine the IP-holders market.
And it hasn't got anything to do with your electricity bill etc.
Games aren't like most consumer goods that are sold. If you have a car, you use it for as long as you need it. You will want to have access to it permanently. The same is true with furnature.
I can't imagine someone saying "hey, this chair, do you wan't to buy it off me? I've been sitting exclusively on this one chair for weeks, and am a bit bored of it. But think I can safely say I got my money's worth"
But with games, it's commonplace. They offer fun for a limited amount of time, and many people are ready to spend 60 bucks on the experience. But when they've done with it, they have no reason keeping it, and sell it on to someone who might have spent 60 bucks on it too, but would rather get it for half that.
Games just have a different value than most things we know. Most use-once-and-fun-is-over items we know can't be resold, such as food.
And it just isn't possible to make all games must-keep-will-always-keep-playing.
For publishers, it isn't a big difference if the games are sold used or pirated.
I believe it's one of the big reasons CERO is saying that the games market in Japan is shrinking. It's a bigger problem than people think.
Slashdot Mirror
But you do have to consider who's losing out and what consequences it will have. Metroid Prime is a great game, and that was known at the time.
We all want to see a whole lot more games by retro studio.
But did you know that Metroid Prime 2 didn't do particularly well considering it's deserved credit?
Whithout sales (new sales) publishers make less profit, and the creative developers are forced to concentrate more on profits than making great games.
And the best way to do that quickly is to flood the market with annual sports updates and movie-based games.
If everyone would have thought like you when it came to Super Metroid, there would be no Metroid Prime.
And in europe, we are paying $80 per game.
Where do you live? I live in Europe and pay nothing like that amount.
I'll try to keep objective when writing this comment, but I am frustrated by people who clearly have no idea of what they are talking about, and try to apply their "knowledge" to existing technologies.
Of course you would have to use energy to melt snow off panels. And obviously you won't want to use it if the energy gain isn't larger.
But by melting a thin layer at the bottom, you would have a flat, wet surface, which would cause the rest of the snow to slide off.
Whether or not it's worth it could be easily calculated by measuring the sunlight and considering the sunlight hours left in a day.
These systems do actually work in winter in cold climates, if maybe not quite so effectively. The reason is that you are using the actual sunlight to heat water, so it doesn't matter what air temperture you have. And when insulated properly, you will have very little energy loss.
Of course you will have less gain in winter, but you are forgetting that people use significant amounts of hot water in summer.
This is where you would see the most gain, and you do not need to be in a hot climate to use it.
Where I live, there are quite a few people who have solar panels on their houses, and it's not a very hot climate.
Solar heating has proven itself possible, and economical in most populated climates. Fact.
I certainly go to news sites I never would have in the past because of a link from Google News
Which is exactly what the big news sites don't want. They want you to keep comeing to their sites no matter how bad or expensive their services are, because you don't know where to find a good alternative.
Sure a mortgage is a loan, what else? It is meant to help normal people pay for larger investments, such as property. If you think you haven't got enough money to pay for such an investment, then that's up to you I guess. (I can't see why you would have two mortgages on a hundred-year-old house that hasn't had any work done in decades anyway)
Depending on what you investment is, it isn't that hard to get a loan for such investments though.
The GDP per capita in the US is about $40k a year BTW.
Alot of poeple can afford it, and alot of people do. If you seriously can't afford to have some work done on your house, then you're a bit of a minority.
Ask around. I bet you won't find it too hard to find someone who bought a house in the past few years, or had something done like had a new heating system installed.
Work and investments like that are completely normal. Everyone does it, and it isn't only something for the obscenely rich.
If you're getting other things done, why not grab the chance and make an investment for the future and coming energy-prices?
You will acutally be saving money in the long term.
As for snow, it could be easily removed by pumping heated water through the panels, which would cause the snow to slide off the flat surface.
Or it could be done by automatic brushes.
Not a mojor problem.
Coming back to practicality, as I said, solar panels are within the financial reach of the average home owner. And wind turbines aren't meant for private households anway. But placing large wind-farms in windy areas can produce electricity cheaply and easily.
BTW, I did mean to say "whinging", the british word.
The massacre is not being put in a positive light.
I never said it was. They were putting the situation and history of the square in a positive light.
For example, Germany and Japan were countries who were enemies of the United States during World War II. Today we embrace those countries and cultures--we don't associate them with "evil". Those events are not part of how we perceive those countries, and we don't associate them with that anymore.
Yes we do. Practically all their foreign policies and interest are closely watched, and any kind of international representation is hard.
They know that they're associated with their past, and accept it.
Of course the people who live in Japan or Germany aren't evil, and shouldn't be descriminated against or insulted (although that does happen alot), because they were "unlucky" enough to have the wrong leaders, or have the wrong people come to power (and that can happen anywhere).
They are as good as any other human beings.
But denying their past, or pretending it never happened is unacceptable (holocaust denial is a crime in Germany). That is exactly what China is doing though.
The history of Germany would also look a little prettier without a genocide of six-million in it, don't you think?
I'd certainly call that putting something in a positive light.
Depending on the construction, it might be hard to access.
What I should have said is that it wouldn't be too hard to keep clean.
The surfaces are so flat that the snow would easily slide off, and could easily be done automatically where it's an issue.
But the angle of the roof would probably be enough for it to slide of by itself.
The simplist solution would be to pump warm water through the panels, which would make the snow slide off.
How a comment like this could be mederated informative is beyond me.
It's just a load of whinging.
If you don't want to invest in Solar heating, that's your choice. They do actually pay for themselves within a few years though. Just don't be complaining you can't afford the oil in years to come.
It's not unusual for people to renew their heating systems, and remortgage their house to get work done.
As for snow, have you heard of an invention called a brush?
And wind power isn't meant for personal use any more than fusion reactors. It's up to you to support it and maybe a little public initiative. Nobody's expecting you to put up a 300-foot turbine in your backyard.
Both technologies have proven themselves very praticable.
Correction: They were bought by Microsoft three-and-a-half years ago, by which time, from what I've heard, many senior developers had left.
You don't have to create positive "information" to put something in a positive light. Censoring anything negative about something, only leaving the positive, can surely be seen as the definition of bias.
What happened at Tiananmen changed the way it would be percieved forever. It might not have been built on evil, or for the sake evil. But it is now associated with violent supression, and evil.
It is part of what is now Tiananmen. Cutting out those parts is manipulating the truth about the place as a whole, and putting it in a positive light.
I'm not agreeing with the grandparent that it should give no results at all, but it doesn't make it any better that they "simply don't mention it".
Wow, I've never seen such extensive use of the word "wire"
If you're prepared to spend $30 on the Nintendo WiFi adapter, $50 for a router isn't gonna kill you.
The Adapter is meant for people who don't have a wireless network set up, and don't have the knowledge to do so efficiently.
With your knowledge, I wouldn't have thought a non-WPA handheld would cause so much problems.
Of course you can take measures to protect yourself. But it's your choice if you want to do it the easy way, or the hard way.
Of course, if you're not intersted in playing the DS online, that's a wholly different matter.
Dark Link is a piece of cake if you go to left hand corner and just stab into the air over and over. The fucker just keeps on jumping into your sword.
Finally, I have the $30 Nintendo USB adapter. It sucks. See other post.
The buy yourself an access point for $50, lock the MAC adress, and use it for your DS.
Security really isn't an issue here.
And if all you're sensetive traffic goes through wires anyway, where's the problem?
I just posted a similar comment up above, but just for the sake of it:
Nuclear power is potentially very safe, just as it's potentially very dangerous. Depending on how carefully you store it, and use it.
Although it is safe in normal operation, things can always go wrong, and they do. Even if the risks are small, a largescale accident could wipe out populations and make huge areas uninhanitable for decades.
The differnce to coal is that you've got highly concentrated radioactive waste, which you want to store in one place. Even if you don't mean it to go anywhere, it's just sitting there posing a potential hazard.
The radiation released by coal is not that significant, and blends into background levels.
And I agree with you that there is alot of misinformation about radioactivity. People don't realise just how radioactive volcanoes are, for example.
But the way it's handled is what makes nuclear power so dangerous, and that's the reason so many people oppose it.
It's not a problem of putting out radioactive material into the environment so much as the dangers involved with storing and handling the highly-concentrated stuff we get from nucear power.
If you can be sure that the waste will be stored with care at proper facilities with no leakage problems, then there's not much of a problem.
But as long as there are kilograms of waste "disappearing" from these facilities all the time, I'd opt for coal anyday.
Even if the risks are small, a largescale accident would have huge impact and could make huge areas uninhabitable for decades.
Gon Into Settings>Advanced and Import. You can select your codec there. Plus, it shouldn't be too long before we see AAC-players.
Which won't bother them at all, as used games damage their profits just as much as piracy, and piracy, unlike resale, is a triable crime.
It doesn't need antigravity, but just a force to counteract the gravitaional force.
If you can't tell the difference, you should take a physics course.
As you correctly point out, an upward force is only exerted when the magnets are moving. Because the gravitational force is constant, and the inductive force increases with the velocity, there will be a point when they cancel each other out and the elevator will drift downward with a constant velocity.
This speed can easily be adapted by changing the resistance in the circuitry.
If it's still to fast, additional rotary generators could mounted to the car.
To stop the car completely and hold it in place, you're going to need mechanical brakes.
Most customers will choose only one console anyways, regardless of when they launch. Simple really.
Why do you think that a maglev elevator would require no power to move down? Unless of course you mean freefall. But if you want to go down in a controlled fashion you still have to exert an upward force, just not quite so much as to completely overcome gravity.
Because no energy is needed. You let it drift down, which will be slower than freefall because of the impedence of the magnetic generator. But yes, it is theoretically falling.
Technically you also exert an upward force, which will be the "friction" whilst falling. But force doesn't equal energy, but rather the product of force and distance does. Because the distance is negative (you're going down) you use negative energy, i.e. you can actually harvest energy from the system.
Lets fine KFC for not telling us the secret ingredient in the batter for the fried chicken, as some little take-away next door is suffering.
I heard somewhere that some people analysed their batter mix and found little more than flower and monosodium-glutamate.
Microsoft has annual revenues of 40 billion a year. The EU has an annual budget of around 100 billion a year. I'd say they're prety much th same league.
fine we will just not sell at all or support our products at all in europe anymore
Wohooo
No they are not. They are like books or dvd's. Mostly used once and then sold, but if enjoyed on the first 'usage' then re-used and lent to friends. And this leads to the 'shared' experience that gets people talking about them.
Did I say anything against re-using games or lending them to freinds? The biggest problem is the kind of mass-throughput and organised cycling of games like we know from ebay and EB-games.
The only examples you give are books and DVDs.
Books are cheap as shit, so most people would rather spend the two extra bucks not to have it covered in old food, sweat stains and creased spines.
DVDs have a completely different market situation. Most people who only want to watch the movie once will rent it, whereby the publisher does recieve a part ov the revenue. It is actually quite a lucrative business for less successful films.
Also the argument of selling an experience or service is a strange way of looking at games in my opinion.
I never said that they were selling a service, and not the game. Of course it's yours when you buy it, to play and re-use and enjoy with your freinds as much as you like.
But it is debatable whether it's right to sell it on afterwards and thus undermine the IP-holders market.
And it hasn't got anything to do with your electricity bill etc.
Games aren't like most consumer goods that are sold.
If you have a car, you use it for as long as you need it. You will want to have access to it permanently. The same is true with furnature.
I can't imagine someone saying "hey, this chair, do you wan't to buy it off me? I've been sitting exclusively on this one chair for weeks, and am a bit bored of it. But think I can safely say I got my money's worth"
But with games, it's commonplace. They offer fun for a limited amount of time, and many people are ready to spend 60 bucks on the experience.
But when they've done with it, they have no reason keeping it, and sell it on to someone who might have spent 60 bucks on it too, but would rather get it for half that.
Games just have a different value than most things we know. Most use-once-and-fun-is-over items we know can't be resold, such as food.
And it just isn't possible to make all games must-keep-will-always-keep-playing.
For publishers, it isn't a big difference if the games are sold used or pirated.
I believe it's one of the big reasons CERO is saying that the games market in Japan is shrinking. It's a bigger problem than people think.