JB0

Moral of the story: 80s cartoons were for future real men. Modern cartoons are for future sissies.

But it's okay, because the moon is now a "lunar planet."

Are you aware of how stupid you are? In point of fact, the FIRST proposed definition, which DID keep Pluto, was chased out because it opened the floodgates to everything else. Not Kuiper Belt objects, EVERYTHING. The only requirement was that it be round and the orbit's center of gravity not be inside a planet. There were at least a half-dozen asteroids on the list. The solar system would have something like a hundred planets before the dust settled. Hell, it was even possible to have "sometimes-planets" because the orbital clause(intended to keep moons from becoming planets) couldn't handle elliptical orbits. If you actually paid attention instead of just guessing based on media soundbites(and if there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that the media CANNOT get a science article right), you'd know that they did everything they could to keep Pluto, but found no way to make a definition that kept Pluto without defining every rogue piece of stellar debris as a planet. Pluto has been the only thing holding a formal definition of planet up for several years. There's just no way to make a rational definition AND include Pluto. The only reason anyone fought about it is that Pluto has sentimental value. "My very elegant mother just sat upon nine" seems to be missing something. Diffrence is pluton was intended to augment planetary status, not replace it. Essentially would've divided things into the inner planets, gas giants, and plutons. It was also purposely constructed to maintain Pluto's signifigance in the face of the bumrush of Kuiper Belt objects that would have joined it on the planet list within a year. Dwarf planet is a formalization of the older minor planet status. Slightly? And Pluto has been debated since 1978! Before we were even sure there WAS a Kuiper Belt. I was mistaken earlier when I said '30s. That was when Pluto was found. Some of Pluto's problems relative to the 8 planets: It's orbit is highly elliptical. It's orbit is inclined relative to the plane of the system. It's absurdly small, and is in fact smaller than many known moons. It's moon is almost as large as it is. It's moon doesn't even orbit it. They actually orbit each other. This point was acknowledged in the former proposed definition, which promoted Charon to planet and the Pluto/Charon system became the first known binary planet. Acutally, Pluto's orbit is probably the most elliptical of all the Kuiper Belt objects, given that it's apogee and perigee hit the inner and outer edges of the belt. Except if you bothered to read, you'd know that it was of objects of similar size. All 8 planets have done that. Pluto has not. If it had, there would be no Kuiper belt. So you're saying that it's orbit is clear because it's too small to clear an orbit? Charon's existence shows it incapable of clearing an orbit. Quit saying suddenly. 2 and a half decades is not sudden. And we have a good deal of info already. The New Horizons mission won't profoundly affect the mass of Pluto or make it's orbit any cleaner.

Kinda like Macross 7, huh? *leaves thread quickly*

So THAT'S why I've been hearing about this game again! I heard about it shortly after it came out, then it just faded away. Nice to see it having a resurgence in popularity. And yah, it really needed a US release.

Speaking of Alternators... I found a Mirage RIGHT after the boards went down. And had to return it because Hasbro pumped a joint full of glue and it snapped when I tried to transform him. Haven't seen another one yet.

As far as brontosaurus vs apatosaurus... They're diffrent. But only one ever existed. The brontosaurus was an apatosaurus with the skull of a chasmosaurus. Pluto's non-planet status has been debated ever since the discovery of Charon in the '30s. It was just a matter of time. And the demotion is because Pluto's orbit covers pretty much the entire depth of the Kuiper belt. For it to be clear, there has to be a REALLY big hole in the KB. And there doesn't seem to be. Ceres is off the list. The promotion of Ceres was one of the things that killed the attempted definition that came up a week before this one(it opened the gates FAR too wide). Interestingly, Ceres was ORIGINALLY a planet. As were Vesta, Juno, and Pallas. After Pallas, they realized they weren't finding isolated objects, but an entire freaking belt of rocks, and all 4 were demoted to asteroids. They remain some of the largest objects in the belt(Ceres is a third of the belt's mass. Vesta and Pallas are the next-largest objects, and Juno is the 7th-largest). Pluto's in the same situation. It was originally a planet, and we later discovered it wasn't an isolated object, but part of the Kuiper Belt. And dwarf planet, while a retarded term, has some precedent. Minor planet is a term that's been in use for a long time. It's basically synonomous with asteroid, but... Ceres has also been promoted to dwarf planet status, apparently.

I was at about the same age level, and I didn't really care for Descent. Probably because I didn't have a good multi-axis stick, and tended to get lost, but still...Wish I could find some of my old shareware disks. There was a demo I had that kicked ass, but I can't remember the name or enough about the game to describe it. Darn right! I'd also just gotten a 5200, and played the ever-living crap out of Star Wars: The Arcade Game at about the same time(I was an avid retrogamer even then). After blowing a good 30 Death Stars up in a row, you start really rooting for the empire.

I'd like to think I notice when I hear a word I know... I'm chalking it up to "those silly wiki people." Even on "reliable" wikis like Wikipedia I can point to a half-dozen major errors without even trying. Including self-contradicting paragraphs.

Isn't that what the Thundercats WERE originally? Hey, you can't make the Silverhawks worse than they already are.And I disavow any knowledge of Jem.

12 is about right. 10-16, depending on how you count it. I was using a MS Strategic Commander. Deus Ex was a test game for it. The SC is a bit loose, but a hell of a lot more fun than keyboard mashing and far better suited to ANY commercial PC game than a gamepad.

The sequel was dumbed down for mass-market console play. So Deus Ex3 would be far better served by staying away from the PS3 and 360.

Dubya. Tee. Eff? Sometimes I wonder if these guys think about things at all. There's no name recognition for the current generation of kids, and we all know Snarf is the retarded sidekick that was only there for comic relief.

Yes! Get our TIE Fighter on, and some PC Battlezone(Starcraft+MechWarrior = fun?), maybe even some Tyrian or something.

Guld's "inherited condition" was just a short temper. Plenty of humans have it too, it's nothing major... Unless, of course, they have serious mental issues because they lost control of that temper, beat up their best friends in high school and maybe tried to rape one of them.

Given that humans and Zentradi are related closely enough to interbreed it is cannibalism. Besides I'm told that human flesh is more like pork than beef, so Hayo's steak couldn't have been Zentradi. Cloned beef grown in a vat (not even a whole cow just the muscle tissue) is my bet. 427692[/snapback] Actually, it could just be uncomfortably close to cannibalism. We don't know that zentradi and homo sapiens are the same species, just REAL close. Since there aren't any second-generation hybrids in the continuity yet, it's still possible that human-zentran pairings are like horse-donkey pairings, or lion-tiger pairings. Close enough to have a kid, but distant enough that said kid will be sterile. The capacity to create fertile offspring is usually considered a major marker for species delineation.

It'd be a great control to keep them from propogating without their masters... if they hadn't given them cloning chambers. Except it's not continuity. The whole "zentradi hybrids are all girls" thing was from the Robotech RPG, which is as far from continuity as you can get. ... Actually, it could even work within the RPG setting. Guld's situation is reversed from the Jeniuses, since his mom is human and his dad is zentran. IF the zentradi genes overpower the human ones, he still has a 50/50 shot because his father has both.

I think Deus Ex was actually pretty highly regarded when it came out. Took home a few "game of the year" awards, and did well enough that they made a sequel. ... Deus Ex 2 bombed, though. As I understand things, they dumbed it down in an attempt to make it more mainstream and wound up driving people off. I have it, but I've never gotten very far in it. It was certainly an interesting game, though.

Ahhh... memories... I happened to start doing more than idle surfing of the 'net right as the Zero Wing craze peaked. Entire forums full of nothing but ZWing quotes, and any serious discussion was subject to having it's zig moved on a moment's notice. It got rather annoying. But once things started to die down(perhaps coincidentally, almost immediatly after it made TV news), Zero Wing became funny.

It's worth a shot, anyways. I ran the single-player FEAR demo on my box for that reason. It sucked like a vacuum cleaner powered by a black hole. Stupid GeForce 5s and their stupid broken pixel shader unit...

Same here. It's just that I have a laptop, bought last December, AMD Athlon 64-bit 3200+, 1024 ram, ATI mobility Radeon Xpress 200 Series. Is there any hope running a game like TES:Oblivion? Or any possibility to get some other graphics card for a laptop? Sorry for semi-off-topic... 426592[/snapback] Laptops are capped where they are in terms of video capabilities. There's just no room to install a video card, so you have to upgrade the laptop to get a new video chipset.

True, but in space, aside from the big gas planets, there really isn't that much of it. Even in the pseudo-scientific technical manuals for Star Trek, they don't claim for such a system to be that effective in producing the quantities needed to sustain a long duration, let alone fast, trip. Here's a scientific article on the idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet And some scientific stuff: "The collected propellant can be used as reaction mass in a plasma rocket engine, ion rocket engine, or even in an antimatter-matter annihilation powered rocket engine. Interstellar Space contains an average of 10 (to the -21st power) kg of mass per cubic meter of space. This means that the ramjet scoop must sweep 10(to the 18th power) cubic meters of space to collect one gram of ions per second." In other words, 10,000,000,000,000,000 cubic Km to get one gram. For fun, in imperial: 62,137,119,200,000,000 cubic miles for all of 0.00220462262 pounds of it. 426578[/snapback] Probably why it usually shows up on relativistic ships in sci-fi. The faster you're going, the longer your volume is, and the less width you need on your scoop to sustain things.

By the Matrix... It's the dreaded Bumblebeevanagelion!

Me too. I have a mega system, so F.E.A.R. ran great for me. Loved the game. 426286[/snapback] My big bottleneck is the video card. I've got a GeForce 5, which has serious issues if you're using pixelshaders. And an AGP slot, which seriously limits my upgrade room and leaves the retailers trying to gouge me on anything of reasonable performance.

Hydrogen is everywhere, actually. The sun's solar wind is largely hydrogen. That's part of why it features prominently as a scifi fuel. If you have a scoop of some sort, you can just fly around and collect fuel from space. It doesn't even have to be a physical funnel, you can use REALLY big magnetic fields.