Comment Re:Oh God (Score 1) 267
Some things are just too evil to put in the same sentence. We're talking resonance cascade here.
Comment And nothing of value was archived (Score 5, Funny) 267
Yes, future generations must know about the horrors visited upon us by the millions of tubgirl and lolcats clones which populated Geocities. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 212
y1p33 k1 y@y m0t||34fu(k3r
Comment Maybe 3,000 isn't so bad (Score 1) 126
You're right. However, they managed to get 3,000 subscribers, which means at $5 per month each they can now afford to pay a full-time newsroom staff of five people, on top of whatever the advertising pays for. Not too shabby.
The Pegasus News manages to cover the entire Dallas-Fort Worth area with a total staff of 19 people.
Comment Re:But The Tyee brings in money (Score 1) 126
The Tyee is not a news site. It is not "good journalism." It is an opinion site. They write stories with very clear opinionated slants. And people who agree with that slant gravitate to the site and call it "good journalism."
Their election "coverage" is nothing more than them asking for money to cover the election from the slant their readers want. Read their appeal again.
From your link:
We asked you to tell us which issues mattered most to you, promised to put your donation towards that area of reporting
This is no different than a consortium of advertisers requesting a newspaper cover an election issue from a particular point of view. This is the same old thing, just more obvious.
This shows me people don't want news that tries to be objective as possible, they want to read something that agrees with their opinions.
Mariners Develop High Tech Pirate Repellents 830
Hugh Pickens writes "NPR reports that owners of ships that ply the dangerous waters near Somalia are looking at options to repel pirates including slippery foam, lasers, electric fences, water cannons and high-intensity sound — almost anything except guns. One defense is the Force 80 squirt gun with a 3-inch nozzle that can send 1,400 gallons a minute 100 yards in any direction. 'It is a tremendous force of water that will knock over anything in its path and will also flood a pirate's ship very quickly,' says Roger Barrett James of the the Swedish company Unifire. Next is the Mobility Denial System, a slippery nontoxic foam that can be sprayed on just about any surface making it impossible to walk or climb even with the aid of a harness. The idea would be to spray the pirate's vessel as it approached, or to coat ropes, ladders, steps and the hull of the ship that's under attack. The Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, a high-powered directional loudspeaker allows a ship to hail an approaching vessel more than a mile away. 'Knowing that they've lost the element of surprise is half the battle,' says Robert Putnam of American Technology Corp. The LRAD has another feature — a piercing "deterrent tone" that sounds a bit like a smoke detector alarm with enough intensity to cause extreme pain and even permanent hearing loss for anyone directly in the beam that comes from the device. But Capt. John Konrad, who blogs for the Web site Gcaptain.com, says no anti-pirate device is perfect. 'The best case scenario is that you find these vessels early enough that you can get a Navy ship detached to your location and let them handle the situation.'"
DARPA's Map-Based Wiki Keeps Platoons Alive 86
blackbearnh writes "One of the biggest problem that a platoon on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan faces is that when a new unit cycles in, all the street-sense and experience of the old unit is lost. Knowing where insurgents like to plant IEDs, or even which families have a lot of domestic disputes, can spell the difference between living and dying. In response to this, DARPA created TIGR, the Tactical Ground Reporting System. Developed as much on the ground in active warzones as in a lab, TIGR lets platoons access the latest satellite and drone imagery in an easy-to-use map based interface, as well as recording their experiences in the field and accessing the reports of other troops. In this O'Reilly Radar interview, two of the people responsible for the development of TIGR talk about the intel issues that troops face in hostile territory, the challenges of deploying new technology meant for combat areas, the specific tricks that they had to employ to make TIGR work over less-than-robust military networking, and how TIGR is impacting platoons in their day to day operations"
Comment Re:They can do that? (Score 1) 137
You deserve some modding up.
The Internet these days is one big Ponzi scheme / information mining operation.
South Park Creators Given Signed Photo of Saddam Hussein
1297
Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of South Park, were given a very special gift by US marines: a signed photo of Saddam Hussein. During his captivity, the marines forced Saddam to repeatedly watch the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut, which shows him as the boyfriend of Satan. Stone said, "We're very proud of our signed Saddam picture and what it means. It's one of our biggest highlights."
Comment Re:Standing ovation -- bah (Score 1) 437
All I know is my gut says "maybe."
Comment Standing ovation -- bah (Score 4, Insightful) 437
First screening impressions sometimes don't mean anything.
I would like to piggy-back on your comment suggesting early reviews were coloured by the excitement (which is probably bang-on) and point out that in the theatre where I watched the first screening of Star Wars: Episode I, there was a standing ovation after the movie was over.
Later I realized there was a standing ovation BECAUSE the movie was over.
Comment Re:Times have changed, but not prices (Score 1) 207
Yeah, we should start a support group. For me that describes this sadistic shitpile of a game which thankfully my dad and I found used for $20 so the pain wasn't too terrible.
Comment Re:Times have changed, but not prices (Score 1) 207
No, but everything he says about that game is true.
I remember almost crying because I'd waited for so long for that game and it was so hard it made absolutely no sense. At the time I thought it was broken, I couldn't comprehend that some asshole would program a game like that deliberately.
Comment Re:Times have changed, but not prices (Score 1) 207
Which is actually a pretty good deal
Maybe, or maybe it means games were always really expensive.
other prices have risen in the same time frame, including the cost to develop a game.
Very true, but instead of being happy when they sell 100,000 copies publishers are now looking at hopefully moving millions.
dropping the price doesn't result in an equivalent increase in sales.
Guess we won't know until they try! Or until those private companies release sales records about what happens when they lower prices to move those millions of copies that didn't sell for full price.
Comment Times have changed, but not prices (Score 3, Insightful) 207
Damn. I used up my mod points already. You make a good point which companies are aware of, they're just too greedy to change. We're paying prices which have been the same for ages, from the days when gaming was a niche hobby and there were fewer copies of games created (which by the magic of supply and demand means they were probably more expensive to make). I remember eagerly shelling out $80 CAD for the first Dark Forces PC game the day it was released. That was unusual - a new release price was about $60, which continues to this day.
Pricing for console games is a little less obvious but I think it's pretty similar to PC game pricing. I remember Atari 2600 games costing about $10-20 (a lot of money for a kid in the 1980s, especially if you save up only to find out your new game is a real shitburger) Nintendo games costing about $50 (an AWFUL lot of money in the late 1980s) and today a new release on any console is $50-70. Factor in inflation and the cost is probably about the same as it's always been.
But even though the cost of making games has increased, the cost of distributing them has dropped drastically. Stamping out DVDs costs pennies and electronic distribution costs even less. I still like getting a physical copy of a game - especially when the publishers put goodies like a special manual or cloth map or figurine in the box - but I would certainly sacrifice that if it meant distribution models like Steam or WiiWare would drive down prices to a more affordable range. I like Steam and WiiWare, but I only buy Steam games on weekend deals (STALKER for $5, w00t) and only use WiiWare for something I really think is worth full price. Electronic distribution needs to be $5-10 cheaper than box copies, IMO.
