Besides, if you are just going to always wait for the next thing to come, you will never get anything. The xbox 360 and its thousands of games are already there. You can go like right now and buy it and play it. You don't have to wait years for it. (Besides, whatever Microsoft's next console might be, its launching price will probably be at least double of what the xbox 360 costs now. You might as well buy an xbox 360 and a ps3 with the same money now.)
They're monetary donations. The point of donations is that you're throwing money at a cause to keep it running. Donating money to something means that you're giving up the money 100% unconditionally; you're not buying shares at the share market.
That's quite a harsh attitude.
I didn't mean to imply that people who donate co-own the server. However, I think that the community deserves more than a one-man dictatorship because they donate and contribute. In technical and legal terms he may own the server (well, he doesn't really own it because it's a rented server, but he is the person directly responsible for its rental), but he doesn't own the community. The community consists of all people who participate and contribute.
Technically, no, because the site owner (e.g. adelikat), as the word implies, literally owns the website. We are being nothing more than guests on HIS server, and we have no given right to be here if he doesn't want to.
If you own a website by paying for a server you have the right to turn it into a pure dictatorship if you want to (it's your complete right to ban everyone but you)
How about the people who contribute with monetary donations?
About Jewish jokes, I don't know if they'd really be pertinent here, as the story isn't Jewish only, some other religions believe it as a Sacred History.
A woman carrying a baby over her head, avoiding enemies and running inside rivers is Sacred History?-)
(Well, in fact, that wouldn't be even far-fetched compared to some religious text out there...)
And it's not like many people don't have both consoles. Of course it's going to cost you double to get both, but they aren't exactly enormously expensive (especially compared to a top-of-the-line modern gaming PC).
Actually I'm not completely sure of that. I'd say "many", but I'm not sure the majority do. (I'd estimate that the majority of retail games don't have a PC port, and the vast majority of XBLA games don't.)
They may suffer from consolitis, but obviously not as much as the original console versions. If you want to play Xbox 360, just upgrade your PC, buy an Xbox 360 controller, and play the PC versions of those games, which are all compatible with the Xbox 360 controller.
Sounds good in theory. In practice, as I commented above, the PC/Windows platform often presents compatibility and stability issues that the Xbox 360 basically lacks completely. I'd estimate that at least 50% of the PC games I have (and I have quite many of them) crash on a regular basis (most of them are still playable, but the crashes are really annoying). I don't know if this is because of bugs/incompatibilities in the games themselves, bugs in eg. the display drivers, Windows getting bit-rotten, hardware compatibility problems, a combination of these, or something, but in the end it doesn't really matter: It's unstable and there's little I can do about it.
There are also other issues: Some of the PC games are so old that it's difficult to run them in a modern PC. Some of the newer games have such high system requirements that they are a pain to play (low framerates, low graphical quality at decent framerates...) Especially the latter is something you don't have to worry about with a console because the hardware is fixed. (OTOH a side-effect of this is that console games get more and more graphically outdated by the month, precisely because of the fixed hardware.)
how is it possible to "climb down" the floor in so many places, skipping a lot of things? O_o
There are many secrets in the game. Those hidden holes in the ground you can climb down are part of regular gameplay. They don't skip anything.[/quote]
You should see how I feel, my computer has been integrated with Bing somehow, mostly from downloading things and they usually say "Do you want to install teh Bing ToolBar?!11one', I click no, but they still install it :\.
If Bing is behaving like a malware, you could try running Spybots Search&Destroy and Ad-Aware to see if they consider it as such and remove it.
About perma-banning users: If someone is such a dick as to get himself banned, but years later grows up a bit and becomes a much more civil and reasonable person (yes, that can really happen), isn't there any way that he can have his ban reversed? Or is it a life sentence?
What about runs that were cancelled, and for whatever reason stand little to no chance of seeing the light of day again? The Willow run deserved publication, but certain things prevented that from ever happening.
That would depend on why it was canceled. If the author doesn't want it published, then it won't be.
I plan to get a new job soon so tha tone day I can a 360 used but is it worth getting now considering all the red rings of death that permated the system for some time?
I bought my xbox 360 about a year ago and haven't had any problems with it.
Compared to a modern PC, the hardware (especially the graphics hardware) is quite outdated (especially because 512 MB of RAM, shared between the CPU and the GPU, is a ridiculously small amount nowadays), but the games still look decently good. OTOH, the stability of the system is superb compared to a typical Windows PC (which is one of the main reasons I bought the thing, as I had got tired of at least half of my PC games crashing on a regular basis, not to talk that my PC is getting outdated and some of the newer games are starting to lag quite badly). AFAIK Microsoft still hasn't announced any next-gen console, so the xbox 360 is still a pretty safe bet, and the game library is quite ample and still being expanded at full throttle.
Forget about playing FPS games, though, unless you are fluent at playing them with the controller. The xbox 360 does not support a mouse (completely on purpose; the logic of this still evades me). AFAIK the PS3 does support mice (or at least some kind of mouse-like devices; I have seen them on sale).
Compared to the other consoles, I don't have experience. The game libraries are slightly different for each console (although there's a great deal of overlap, especially between the xbox 360 and the PS3). If you like JRPGs, there's less supply on the xbox 360 side than on the PS3 side (I don't really know why this is so; maybe it has to do with the PS3 being Japanese and JRPG producers making exclusivity deals with Sony). There are some good ones for the xbox 360, though.
You can't play games online with the xbox 360 unless you pay Microsoft yearly fees, which sucks if you like online games. (Personally I find them boring so this isn't a big deal for me.) You can still download and purchase games (and movies/music) from xbox live without having to pay those fees, though. (Local multiplayer isn't hindered by this either, of course.)
I think that the original idea with the revival project was that it was felt that some runs were unjustly rejected in the first years because we were still establishing proper judging guidelines and the judging was a bit cowboyish and sometimes too rushed. Since the judging process has been a lot more defined and "stable" in later years, there's probably not going to be many rejected runs in the past couple of years that were so for unjust reasons.
Of course this is a good opportunity for someone to bring up their opinion if they think a specific run has been rejected for unjust reasons. If someone can provide good arguments for re-judging a specific run, it could be evaluated again.
Why release them? Maybe so that people in other countries can be cured of cancer? Little detail, that.
Wouldn't it be ironic (and hypocritical) to complain that the FDA is shutting down a miraculous cancer cure because of greed... discovered by a doctor who doesn't want to divulge this cure worldwide because of, you guessed it, greed (ie. he wants to patent it to get rich).
(Of course the more likely explanation is that the cure doesn't really work that great, and he's not divulging it because he knows it, and he wants to cash as much as he can while the hype is going on.)
I try to search, but i don't even know what is a bios, so it's like i was looking for someone i don't know. Can someone tell me what is a bios? Thanx!
A BIOS is, roughly speaking, a primitive operating system of the console, which has been hard-coded into its ROM. In other words, it's just like a ROM, but one which comes bundled with the console itself.
A console emulator needs this BIOS software if it wants to run any of the games. Usually the BIOS data is not included with emulators because it would be a breach of copyright. You'll have to find the BIOS from somewhere (and take into account that, technically speaking, it's not legal, although I have never heard of any console system company prosecuting this).
It's a policy in this site that we don't give links or direct instructions on how to get this material, so you'll have to do some googling yourself.
B) Evolution is a process of a species changing over the course of a period of time to adapt to its environment.
I know what you meant is pretty much accurate, but I'm going to be extra nitpicky here (simply because I have quite a pedantic personality).
As you worded it, it sounds like species make a conscious (or possibly subconscious) effort to change their own genes to adapt to their environment, in a similar way as eg. a human society could change its culture and habits to adapt to a changing environment. I know that's not what you meant, but the way you worded it makes it sound like that.
Of course what happens is that small random changes happen in genes all the time. Some of these random changes help the lineage inheriting those changes to survive slightly better than others. Bad genetic changes will make the chances of survival of that lineage worse. The worst changes just die out sooner or later and end up disappearing from the general population. Over long periods of time this natural selection of best genes makes species evolve to naturally adapt to a changing environment.
Right. Nonsensical is your argument with nfq where you specifically imply his belief is wrong, while neither you nor him can prove or disprove it in the first place. There can, however, be particular reasons justifying said beliefs. The only way to be right here is not to argue, science isn't (yet) involved here.
I think you are nitpicking about wording.
It's perfectly sensible to say "this isn't so" even though you can never have 100% sure proof of that. After all, perhaps nothing is at it seems. Perhaps I'm the only sentience in this illusory world, nothing is as it seems, I'm just a brain in a jar (colloquially speaking, of course) and everybody else is just a figment of my imagination. If that's the case, everything I could possibly assert about the universe would be false (except perhaps "I think, therefore I exist").
But that wouldn't be practical in any way. In fact, thinking like that would on the contrary be detrimental.
I can perfectly well say "this computer I'm using right now exists". I can't prove it with 100% certainty (nothing can), but there's no reason for me to doubt its existence. I can measure it, test it, verify that all these measurements and tests always give consistent results, I can compare to measurements and tests made by others and verify their consistency with my own, and so on.
I don't have to say "I believe this computer exists". In fact, that would imply something quite different.
In the same way I can perfectly well say "the universe/nature has no sentience". The statement is based on available evidence, and it's not a statement of absolute certainty.
I coincidentally stumbled across this while browsing for something else completely. It seems that the fluoridation and vaccine conspiracy theories are pretty old (the flier is from 1955). It's all a communist conspiracy!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unholy_three.png
I know, it's a terrible thought. I'd love to believe our government and corporations are here to serve us and would never hurt us for their own gain. I'd love to believe that fluoride is good for you and that the spikes in autism and cancer have nothing to do with the aforementioned powers. I'd love to believe 9/11 was an outside job. I'd love to, but I can't. The world has evil people in it, and we can never underestimate what some of them are capable of.
So you are basically saying that you believe in all those conspiracies for the simple reason that there are evil people in this world. Frankly, that's quite a stupid argument.
You clearly don't understand how science works. Even if there was a huge evil organization rotten to its core that would want to establish some falsities as the currently accepted scientific truth, that would simply be physically impossible. You can't control the entirety of the world-wide scientific community. The scientific peer-reviewing process makes sure of that. Things are evaluated, tested and experiments repeated by different people from different countries and cultures. If something is false, someone is going to raise questions and others will have to answer those questions satisfactorily. How exactly is this evil corporation going to silence all of the scientific community? Claims like "the FDA is suppressing cancer cures, and in fact wants to cause cancer" is such an US-centric notion that it gives me nausea. It's like the only country in the world with any saying on medicine would be the USA (and hence the FDA). Any person making such claims is an idiot in my books. (The same goes for all the other conspiracy theories as well.)
FODA wrote:
If you believe there are no sentient planets then how can you believe there can be any sentient planet? That doesn't make much sense.
"Do you believe that fairies exist?"
"No."
"Would it at least be possible that they exist, but we simply haven't detected them?"
"I suppose."
"So do you believe they exist?"
"No."
There's nothing illogical in this argumentation. Conceding that something is possible doesn't mean you have to believe it exists, and there's nothing nonsensical there.
The system that Jetblade uses for detecting if a point P is inside an arbitrary convex polygon ABCDE... involves taking the cross products of PA x AB, PB x BC, PC x CD, etc. If any of those cross products points in a different direction from the others, then the point lies outside; otherwise it lies inside.
Detecting if a point is inside an arbitrary (non-self-intersecting) polygon, on the other hand, requires a slightly different approach, but isn't significantly more complex. A standard problem in computer graphics (and something I buggered students with for quite many years).
This actually came handy in an actual program I once had to develop (it was a library which you could use to define the boundaries of a 2D sprite with an arbitrary polygon; you could, among other things, move the sprite by clicking and dragging with the mouse inside the polygon which, of course, required applying this algorithm).
