They're also the only 3D Sonic titles that didn't suck. Panzer Dragoon didn't get a Dreamcast game either, IIRC.

As for the other games you mention, there's quite a few that weren't really "Dreamcast" games, but rather arcade ports - that's basically what kept the DC from having effectively zero third-party support, since they got amazing, accurate ports of what could be argued as the best arcade games out there at the time. Specifically, that relationship between NAOMI and Dreamcast also garnered them Capcom's support, and Capcom was churning out an incredible number of hits and absolutely in their prime years around that time. MvC2, SoulCalibur, Resident Evil, Power Stone, Street Fighter. Two of those were in the over-a-million group for DC (which is only 7 games), the third is one of the most popular fighting game series of all time, if not the most popular, and the fourth is one of the other contenders for that title.

Without Capcom, Dreamcast would have been truly dead to quality, exclusive third party mass-market development. There were other quality titles out there, like Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver and Tony Hawk, but they weren't exclusive (both were ported from PSX) and as a result didn't bring enough to the Dreamcast to make it THE console to own.

Yeah, the thing is, I only ever remember playing the one from Sonic Adventure. Looking it up, there's quite a few games that had either no minigame and/or no ingame functionality.

Stab someone with a butter knife or Bic pen, and you'd still be charged with the same "assault with a deadly weapon".

You mean the standards set by the politicians who are paid by the private prison lobby? That's the situation we have today.

I've posted this elsewhere in more detail, but Blockbuster, due to the spinoff from Viacom, was saddled with about a billion in debt. That debt didn't exactly help when Icahn ended up ousting Antioco, who was trying to modernize the brand, and replaced him with Keyes, who was trying to be the brick and mortar shop of the past. That's just two examples of times Blockbuster the brand got completely fucked by outside interests. There's plenty of others in the chain's history, like Bill Fields being fired.

What's weird to me is that insurance companies aren't at all incentivized to reduce costs. In fact, they're blatantly incentivized towards raising costs. It really doesn't matter whether they're capped at 20% profit - their profit scales with larger overall numbers, so they're incentivized to keep costs high and push them higher in all situations. If healthcare costs rise 10%, they can push their insurance prices up 10%, and have a 10% increase in profit, even under the same percentage cap. Doctors like it too, since they'd make an extra 10% on the same procedure. Even the patients, in most cases, care far more about quality care than about the cost of care.

Auto insurance and repair has plain old economics going for it - as spare parts become more available later in a car's production run, the costs drop. Home/flood insurance seems like it would be subject to the same upward incentive in home prices as health insurance, with the caveat that housing prices usually remain relatively stagnant outside of a bubble and there's not much the insurance companies can do to affect pricing anyway.

Healthcare, though, becomes a problematic outlier relative to other types of insurance - how do you lower costs when almost all the players have a tangible incentive to help costs rise and the ability to do so, and even the consumer has an ambivalence to cost as long as quality is maintained/improved and the cost burden doesn't reach a certain (unknown) untenable threshold for a large enough percentage?

That's the problem the US is attempting to deal with in healthcare, at its' core. It's probably the most complicated economic and policy problem possible - how do you regulate a market that has almost nothing providing natural balancing factors? Supply and demand are effectively nonexistent, healthcare isn't optional (and never really was, even before the ACA), and all the players are rewarded for pushing on the same side of the scale.

Seems like a regulatory problem, more than a problem with chip-and-pin. You can always just legislate away credit card issuers' responsibility, regardless as to whether they use chip-and-pin or not.

Card not present transactions are already the primary target, as far as I can tell. I've never replaced a card for an in-person fraud, but I've had at least one replacement, if not more, for each of my cards (including ones never used online) on online orders.

If everyone uses a strategy that counters battleships, and nobody uses them, then the design and concept of the battleship is, by definition, obsolete.

You do realize that the vast majority of battleships worldwide were decommissioned in the 50's and 60's, and no navy has had a battleship in service since the 90's, right? The first Iraq war was the last time one was used.

About the Seoul City thing, I looked it up, because I was curious as well. It seems that Seoul's full name is "Seoul Special City", and the area around Seoul is the "Seoul Capital Area". I'm guessing he said "Seoul City" to make clear the service would be offered in the city proper, and would normally be translated with the "city" dropped from his statement.

Not really. ABP needs to certify the company's advertising practices to at least a moderate degree. They need to do extra work to allow only ads that are unobtrusive. They make no attempt to hide that they get paid by large companies, and give every user the opportunity to opt out. That's not terrible ethics, that's transparency in action.

It's extraordinarily well known that they accept unobtrusive ads - go to their web page, and it's literally bullet point #2 under their heading, sandwiched between "Blocks banners, pop-ups and video ads - even on Facebook and YouTube" and "It's free", with a link to a page describing *why* they do it and instructions on how to turn it off if you so choose. Many of the people who use Adblock Plus, myself included, use it specifically to block intrusive or broken ads, rather than all ads. As an example, on Twitch, there's ads that play in certain spots of the stream determined by the streamer - that could be fine, except for the fact that Twitch ads are broken. They don't adhere to volume settings, and frequently crash the player - a giant pain when you just happen to have a stream on while doing something else, especially since they always run a "preroll" ad when you load or reload a stream, which itself can crash the player. That's outright unacceptable. Google ads, OTOH, are about as unobtrusive as they get, and don't outright break the sites they're on, so I don't have a problem with that.

Why do you think that being for expansion in one area means you're for expansion in all areas? Clearly, government needs to do more to promote competition in the ISP business, and just as clearly, government is overreaching with the TSA and spy agencies, which need to be more limited. It's no so simple to say "fuck big government" or "let's expand government", either of which is such an extraordinary simplification of the fact that it blows me away that people take either side seriously.

BTW, people will hate the IRS regardless as to whether they grow, shrink, or just stay the same size, so they're pretty much irrelevant to whether you hate the size of government as long as it exists. Don't; forget, the early history of the US was rife with infighting over taxes.

It really is due to municipalities and states in the US. South Korea is so far ahead because there's a bunch of choices - 4 major ISPs, plus 2 of their major cell operators are both rolling out LTE-A at 300mbps, which is entirely a viable option instead of the land-based ISPs. In the US, the federal government hasn't rectified the problem that states and local governments are causing with their exclusivity deals and blocks against municipal broadband, but it's not entering into those agreements for the locals either. The federal government is allowing the problem to persist, at least to some degree - I don't know how well they'd be able to argue for striking down local laws like this, even if there was a will to do it. Net neutrality is much easier for the federal government to get involved in than how states deploy the infrastructure.