fuchikoma

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxu8vIACg_E Yukihiro Takahashi (50) and Haruomi Hosono (55) "jam" on a glitchy version of "Pure Jam" 21 years after its album debut. This must be the ugliest piece of bread I've ever eaten Wrapped in a foil-like substance It's an unidentified object Shapelessly square God, it's so ugly (Jam desho) I wonder why Maybe the answer lies (Sore jam desho, dozo) In the thickness or the size

Basically it sounds to me like the investors generally aren't counting on any mining-related returns for this - and realistically, the project will probably fail before they reach that stage anyway (because long expensive projects are ill-fated...) However, so many useful modern technologies came out of the NASA space program - uniquely ambitious plans like that require novel, original ideas and world-class R&D to pull off. It could still be hugely worthwhile to set a plan like this in motion. It's also entirely possible these investors could see some returns on patents generated and similar things. They could come up with some kind of high efficiency thrusters, low-power CPUs, lightweight super materials, more efficient means to mine ores on Earth, and so on.

What I see is a pretense for continued scientific space exploration and tech development. If someone wants to foot the bill for that... awesome!

True, but we did call on people to choose, so I figured after a week of inactivity I'd call it finished. You were a good opponent, man! I laughed out loud a few times, like "What shit do I control? ALL THE THINGS" and "I see an enemy completely without imperfection. Oh snap, I was just looking at my own reflection"

And a week later, the winner, holding the only vote cast - is SixTwoSixFour! GG, G. It was fun.

Now all that's left is to start a multibillion dollar lobby to argue in court for us, and buy politicians to pass the laws back toward the consumer's favour... [Dean beat me to it! I didn't even see that until I came back to check the thread...]

Don't tell me it eight all your files?

If I had to shoot from the hip and make something up, I'd say... 20-25 years for the initial copyright - you could tell the industry it's still a generous extension from the original 14-year term, and it would be well timed so that the things people grew up with would be usable by them as adults. Then, for exceptional cases where they still use them actively - like The Simpsons, 10 year extensions could be approved on an individual basis by a judge. Say someone writes a classic novel, they die but have no heirs or next of kin, and the publisher decides to extend copyright? Sorry - not good enough; it's just an old work and they've already had 25 years to make the vastest share of profits already.

Well... with a flashcard or emulator, I'm certain there's a team working to translate the DS version...

I'd still recommend it after a patch or two come out. Maybe he wasn't designing the difficulty for "a player" but for "the playerbase" (ie. he didn't want something "the Internet" would figure out too quickly.)

I don't know if all of them are... but some definitely are. I normally like to finish a game with only the resources in the game as my guide, but I was talking abut Fez with a friend the other night and how it was slowing down a lot at the end with all the unopenable secret rooms and he mentioned this. IMO, you would not be amiss to find a glyph guide for the game - though it's theoretically possible to derive the readings of everything - personally I'd have more fun spending a day in MS Excel making spreadsheets.

No. I won't post any solutions, but I'll err on the side of caution and hide this:

Ok, so the spatial puzzles are fun, but late in the game when it gets into codebreaking, it's about as enjoyable as writing an accounting exam for a course you never took in the first place. I understand now why I've seen so much criticism that if you're not Phil Fish, you simply won't solve some puzzles. I was actually holding back from saying this until I found one that assumes you will have certain third party hardware and software capabilities completely separate from the XBox 360 - if you don't, you're out of luck; you're simply not getting all the cube bits. Also, it gets really choppy in some of the later levels, but then, it also crashes a fair bit, so maybe it's just choppy when it's on the edge of crashing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkjGn8CZ_QM

The world famous Alstroemeria Records' version of the ancient (1998) Touhou Project song ...done in a style (wagaku?) fit for an NHK cultural program...

I think the music usually fits well, but when it comes to ambient type stuff, I'd go about as far as DJ Krush or Prefuse 73, but not quite to Boards of Canada, so I guess it's a matter of taste. It is clever the way it muffles when you're behind the scenery though and that may not seem as natural with other styles of music.

Yeah. I think for the next 5-10 years, it will still be quite possible to run arbitrary code on PCs simply because if people can't do it one way, they'll do it another - like Linux, BSD, even MacOS. Though it's still unnerving to think that serious questions have been raised over whether that will always been an option. Personally, I think in the forseeable future, restrictions like that will be like desktop TPM options - easily switchable in the BIOS at the user's discretion. Still, it's something anyone who values these freedoms should keep an eye on as there would be huge money to be made by very powerful companies by removing that flexibility.

Utopia/Bob, Windows ME, Windows Vista... It seems every 2-3 major releases, they try to break the mold, but break everything else instead. I'm cautiously... cautious about Win8. While there are possible technical justifications for it, I am very concerned about the plan to have a recovery mode that resets everything, preserves "apps" and wipes all traditional programs. It's a heavyhanded push to drive consumers into MS' walled garden app store and turn general purpose PCs into... smartphones, basically, for all but the hardcore userbase. Then if most users stick with the app store, why even support the old way? A generation or two later, why even allow free development of software without buying a license from MS and having your submissions all approved? "It's a security risk..."

Spot-on, sadly. After he told everyone that it wasn't pageviews that mattered, but unique pageviews (ie. from people who don't even visit the site normally) it was apparent the core readership wasn't the main focus.

I got a star on Kotaku fairly early on, so it counted across the whole network. Then I was destarred and banned on Kotaku when Kirk took over the same time I came here. I mostly used it to read and promote thoughtful comments, and like I told Kirk, it's up to him whether he thought they'd be better off without that. After the ban, I was still allowed and starred on all other Gawker sites, but now that you can only sign in through a third party company's ID, it's a moot point anyway - the whole network is dead to me for commenting. So... even if I had still intended to comment there, the scrapping of the star system makes no difference because I'm already locked out, haha. It's like they're trying to push themselves into irrelevance. Still, in theory the end of stars sounds like a good idea because it implies actually taking some responsibility for user comments on there, which stars clearly did not do for long.

I think he did a really good job of conveying the idea of a character understanding an additional dimension while everyone else goes on unaware of it. Much more intellectually accessible than (or so I'd assume - Miegakure, like Fez, was announced ages ago - there's still no demo.) The music in Fez... I figured it would be well received, but to be honest, I don't notice it most of the time - just when it starts to grate on my nerves, which is surprisingly often; especially when you get into things like the glitchy screechy nighttime themes. I'm having fun with that. There are just too many rooms where no matter what I do, I can't even imagine what it takes to uncover all the paths from it/hidden features. I've given up on several, expecting maybe I'll get to jump twice as high later or some new gameplay mechanic might manifest because some of them seem physically impossible. Seems to be a common complaint about this from what I've seen - head-scratching on the level of old adventure games where you kind of had to be the author to figure it out.