fuchikoma

Yeah... Japanese Ace Attorney games often end up with English scripts later (maybe backported from localization?) anyway, so it'd be weird not to make the app international - especially since these games are already localized on gaming handhelds. I'd be surprised if they didn't already have the translated version waiting to go live. As for learning Japanese to get the stuff that isn't localized... Well, it doesn't take hard work, just lots of it. If you can find it fun, it's not so bad. It's just a long road to fluency, especially for reading, so you can't let that get you down too much. When I started, Japanese games owned all the consoles and anime/manga were just starting to be seen as "a thing" in the West, but already it was common to censor/rewrite stuff with no indication anything had been changed. It's certainly easier to get stuff translated now, even as far as fanmade translation patches for games. Still, I'd totally recommend anyone try to learn some second language to fluency. It's fun and endlessly fascinating picking up all the cultural bits, at least for a geek like myself.

That sounds way better to me. I'd be all over it if I hadn't made it so far into the original game. Now it sort of sits in limbo where any fight I go into results in my partner losing 125%-175% of their HP since I simply do not engage that crazy d-pad fight system. Sometimes it seems like TWEWY was made to prove everything that was said about the DS, from the really cool stuff, right down to the concerns that turned out to be a non-issue for most games (like "I only have one set of eyes, so why would I want two screens? I can't focus one on each screen at once.")

Stuff by HalfBrick. Fruit Ninja's alright, but I'm especially fond of Age of Zombies and Jetpack Joyride... aaand... yeah. The rest depends. I have folders for "sensors," social networking/IM, news, information, reference, number crunching, site portals (mainly video apps like TED, RSA, Crunchyroll and NHK), stat tracking, education, and 10 folders for various categories of games. 5-0 Radio is a popular one when I show it to people. You can probably find a feed of your local police radio chatter so when you hear sirens you can find out why. Parcel is great for tracking packages. ZBar scans barcodes and glyphs like QRCodes, Decibel 10th tells you the sound level of your environment. SoundHound identifies songs it hears.

I don't know... how do leaks like Halo 4 normally happen? Someone in the company leaks it? Someone hacks a server that holds it? It wouldn't be hard to stage either one of those. I'd be surprised if a member of the release groups personally infiltrated any game or movie studio something leaked from...

For one thing, it would defeat the purpose if they publicized it. The idea is that it would appear to be a proper leak, but be a bogus version of the game. Also, I didn't think it'd generate this much discussion. It was more of a "wouldn't it be funny if..." sort of idea.

We're talking about deliberately releasing a leaked version, or keeping the development version one-off from the production version and swapping in the real assets before the discs get minted. It might increase piracy of the game somewhat, but the only ones who can use the leaked version would have modded consoles already, and when the real version goes to stores, they'd see that what they played wasn't it. (Sure, someone could rip the final version then and let people pirate it too... but it would be a funny way to mess with pirates and distract them from looking for a real leaked copy.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjTxDQxpCfg It's 17C above and sunny here... Soon it will slip to +/- 5C, overcast and rainy/sleet... and then before long, winter. ...so I'm gonna go outside and play on the motorbike a bit while I can!

Though for things like that that interfere with the ability to properly play the retail version of the game, they have to make sure it works 100%. I have a friend who has been adversely affected by FADE ("Real games don't fade!" ...except when they do) so now he's switched to pirating stuff from Codemasters and Bohemia so his games WON'T subtly decay while he plays them. Of course you can see why this kind of thing would cause problems if it deleted files or wiped partitions too... But I was thinking something like the special pirate version of some games (or just this one?) A version that's deliberately leaked, but instead of having a novelty tweak, it'd look legit and the plot would just be wrong in ways that would get under the skin of serious fans.

With the special pirate versions of some PC games that have come out, I think it would be really funny if with Halo 4, they deliberately leaked it, but with different voice acting and cutscenes in places, enough to really mess with the heads of people who downloaded the leaked version. I don't know enough about the plot, but I'm thinking of stuff like killing off main characters and changing the context of the battles, etc. Of course this would all take extra money, but I'm basically thinking a bit of script writing and voice acting, and maybe a little bit of realtime animation work... then when they send it to production, switch it back to the real version, so until then, the pirates would be bothered by what had happened to the series, and when it launched, they'd have to buy the legit copy to see what really took place (then play through the same missions over again...)

It doesn't really bother me much either... I'm just trying to share the rationale that probably governs it in North America. Linguistic prescriptivism is fun, but ultimately futile. Contractions reminded me one thing that really stands out to me is illogical plurals. It's hard to think of good examples since my brain just doesn't work that way and refuses to remember most of them, but I've noticed folks from the East cost here will say things like "anywheres you've been" and my parser starts turning out stuff like "because I've been to more than one anywhere?"

Stuck in the 80s this week.

They become one Coldplay because like I said, there is only one of the band. You could say "people are doing something" but that's because it refers to a group of persons - a plural. Proper nouns are normally singular though - because they refer to a unique entity and not a class of them. There aren't several Coldplays (at least referred to as a group of them when one says "Coldplay,") there is only one. If it was a plural, they'd be "The Coldplays," which would then make sense with "are". As for referring to place or team names, I'd say it's singular, at least when referring to the overall group. In sports and politics, over here at least, they tend to be referred to in singular form with "is" though. "China is expanding" (or "has" ambitions, rather than "have"), or "[sports team] is [winning/losing/improving/etc]".

My car is made up of parts too, but I wouldn't say "My car are at the shop." There is one Coldplay, that is only manifest when the members are all together. I think it depends if you're referring to the band or the people in it. "We are Coldplay. Coldplay is here." Also, both Manchester the place and the team are made up of the people therein, unless you're talking about something directly affecting the geography of the place. If you were saying the place was having a bad year, you'd probably mean the people, not that the area was shrinking or something.

How to check if your Android phone is vulnerable to the USSD security flaw. Avira, Bitdefender and others have released tools specifically to address this.

That sounds like the old maxim along the lines of "The measure of a society's civilization is seen in how it treats its most vulnerable members." There are countless versions attributed to many people, but I wouldn't say women can automatically be assumed to fill that role. Perhaps real progress lies in parity, rather than elevating one at the cost of another? Though with the oppression we've seen in Pakistan and Afghanistan, it seems quite apt to equate that with women. There may be more downtrodden, but like MaliciousH said, they need to learn that people are people.

Just because piracy would give someone the freedom to play a game early - which would be an incentive to pirate it - that does not mean that as a potential pirate, there is an obligation to do so. And yeah... lots of people DO grab movies and albums before they're legally available when someone leaks them, so I don't see the point you're making about how that is any diffrent from grabbing a game that's released in one zone and not another. I suppose in the former case you could morally justify it to yourself a bit better, but choosing to pirate something is more of a practical choice than a moral one, IMO.

Yeah, the icon remains, probably also tied to basic installed data when applicable. Maybe also to your save files since there's no way to manage saved games on this thing.

I had a strange one the other night that was more notable because it was lucid... I looked out my living room window and saw the neighbours across the street painting their car with the kind of sprayer wand you'd use at a manual car wash. It was gushing this watery-looking orange paint and it was splashing off the road and spraying the front of my house and probably my car parked in front of it. It was all over the place. So I grabbed my camera and ran to the window and started recording them for a few seconds until it hit me how weird this really was. So I opened up my camera and pulled out a AA cell (funny - it takes a rectangular Li-ion pack in real life...) and then cribbed a trick out of Inception - I thought "if I'm dreaming, this thing will spin when I drop it." I tossed it on the floor and it started , then just to be sure, I pressed down on the middle a couple times, but it always picked up energy and stood up again. With that, I thought "well! Nothing to worry about then!" I went out onto the front steps and carefully flew up onto the roof to get a better vantage point to watch them spray the car with paint...

Things like this make me glad I didn't have Youtube as a kid... Not that I remember getting quite that silly, but I think I'd be mortified if I reached 16 or 17 and something like this was still floating around.

Life lessons from youkai-rock group the "Dog-god Circus Troupe." One serious, one not so much... "Life is short, so love, mankind!" "Brainwashing"

I meant how the proper pronunciation of words in Cantonese includes the use of tones on each syllable, but to me a lot of Cantonese music seems to deliver the words with a flat tone or override it with the musical notes. I was just wondering if it was just too subtle for me to pick up on, or if maybe the meanings were just derived from the context each word was used in. And yeah, Japanese... Tone counts for something, but it's really not integral to the meaning, and you're guaranteed to have lots of vowels since in addition to the 5 standalone ones - all but one sound are tied to vowels automatically. I think that'd lend it well to lyrics. I actually wasn't thinking about how each language flowed... Cantonese often sounds fairly clipped, but that can make some good clear rhythms too. (lol... The start of that MTH video threw me. I was thinking "WTH? They didn't go pop... that makes no sense...")

I mean that a game based on this would be as random as Calvinball.