This sucks. Don't get me wrong, I loved how they portrayed their respective characters in the LOTR movie (except, maybe, Elijah Wood couldn't convince me as Frodo, but, then again, he could never convince me as any character in any movie). What I wanted to see was some diversity -- different people with different acting, different characterization. When I was younger, I would like the unified choice, but these days, I think that difference in portrayals could only enhance the appreciation of both the movies and the books. Having the same actors and the same director is basically the same as having only one artist making illustrations of the book.

There should have been only one.

While I agree, wouldn't it look even worse to, say, Sweden?

Like this?

I can see your points, and I agree with some of them. Cecil's character really looks weird, but it gets a lot better when he turns into a paladin. The voice acting is horrible, I'd rather they remained silent. I agree that, if you can't get past the first three hours, you probably won't have fun playing the game. But, then again, these were not enough for me to put the game aside. I really liked to see characters in 3D, the remade cutscenes and scenarios. That's why I think I would like to see a remake of FFVI. Thanks for the nice chat, hope you have fun playing games (Square/Enix released recently an new old-school FF for the DS, 4 Warriors of Light. I couldn't play it yet, but I expect it to be good).

I agree that it is a matter of opinion. I just finished playing both versions of FFIV (Advance for the GameBoy and the remake for the DS) and the games are nearly identical. The DS version has a few additions that can be ignored if you don't want to deal with them, and while damages and powers have changed, I found both versions to be equally balanced. I had fun with both. While I couldn't play FFIII in paralel with the old version (I played it sometime ago, though), I thought that the DS version was fun, and a little stronger on the history side. Granted, the newer versions don't have the same impact that the older had -- they were new games at the time. So, this is an honest question, not flaming or trolling: why do you think they're bad games?

The game industry is in a point where remakes can add a lot to the fun factor. Square/Enix did a great job in the remakes of Final Fantasy III and Final Fantasy IV. If they release a version of Final Fantasy VI and/or Final Fantasy VII for the 3DS, I will sleep on the line to buy one.

That's very interesting. I didn't know that. I admire them deeply, all of them. Emily Rosa was born in 1987, according to the Wikipedia article, which makes her 23 now. I don't think she reads Slashdot, though. I would be delightfully surprised if so.

Very nice to find that there are kids who are being taught about science. Before them, Emily Rosa was the youngest to publish a peer-reviewed paper. Her paper was an amazing experiment to refute terapeutic touch in a very well conducted study. Kudos to them

This reminds me of the luminiferous aether and the Michelson-Morley experiment. A lot of physicists at the time were certain that luminiferous aether existed, but no experiment was able to prove it -- even with the proposed adjustments that are also cited here. Then Einstein, from the work of others, came with relativity theory. I always thought that string theory was weird (not that the universe should care about what I think, anyway), but maybe scientists are looking in the wrong direction. It would be really exciting if a completely different theory appears.

Since they're broadcasting via electromagnetic waves, I suppose they are trying to install Linux in the Universe. It will take a little while for the changes to propagate, but maybe -- only maybe -- the Universe might make a little more sense from now on. I heard they were trying BSD instead, but the drivers weren't available...

Correct! After all, the words recited from the Linux kernel are not very different from the babbling and mumbling from the last Lady Gaga success!

When I started using computers, they used K7 tapes to store programs. You know, they were mostly used for audio, but since they were cheap, it was a perfect media for home computers of that time -- bits were converted to sound, mostly using some sort of frequency modulation. There was no Internet then (I know, how can one imagine a world without the Internet), so the only source of information about computers were magazines and an occasional TV or radio program. Well, there was a weekly radio program where I lived that broadcast computer programs -- the binary files themselves. You just pressed "record" in your tape recorder, hoping the transmission was good enough, and then you could load it in your computer. Sometimes, they broadcast ZX Spectrum, sometimes it was MSX programs. They usually worked well, but sometimes the noise in the transmission would cause a lot of errors. It was a very nice way to distribute the programs

Isn't it fitting that Eris is the goddess of chaos?