JB0

The pinpoint barrier's funciton isn't really explained, but we know the barrier isn't powered solely by the ship's intenral power source. It operates with energy from a dimensional rift, at least in the original show. I say all the rules we normally work with go right out the window there. For all we know, alll barrier disks are equal in power, just diffrent size. Which would mean a beam larger than the barrier disk is gonna rip through you from spillover, but other than that anything a battleship can deflect is something a tiny fighterplane can deflect. Heck, smaller disks could be STRONGER because the alien energies are focused more tightly(think about folding a sheet of paper in half a few times and then trying to tear it). I do grant that it's possible smaller barriers are weaker barriers. Just not documented, or even really implied. Not in space. In space, size is everything. The gunship's less massive than other vessels, so it's got less velocity to shed at any given maneuver. If it has any maneuvering capabilities at all(which it does), then the gunship can dance relative to other vessels. Footnote: This is also a justification for the transformation. The Macross can move an arm instead of using propellant to change its angle(a slow and expensive process acording to Newton's 3rd law of motion).

I'm waiting for EA VS MS. The 2 companies we love to hate duking it out for supremacy and GLOABAL DOMINATION!111 Anyawys, I think buying small developers IS the same after you've bought enough of them. And it's not like Maxis and Origin were total unknowns.

There's no really good reason to dock the gunship before firing. It should be capable of autonomous operation for one shot, though I'll grant docking for recharging purposes(if it's powered by supercapacitors instead of an internal generator, it has no way of recharging for a second shot undocked).

Missed the boat on that one. They've been buying smaller developers up for years.

I too own The Sentinels. But I taped mine off the air. No cash version. With vintage ads.

The Battle 7 wasn't something new, it was a complete aberration and an insult to the Macross itself, good thing it was destroyed, too bad they were building another one..bleh.. I have 2 words for you. Daedalus Attack. You are defending a boxing battleship, you really don't have a lot of room here. On the Daedalus attack, the ship was used to put a big hole on the enemy ship, then the forward hatch would open to reveal a bunch of destroids that just blasted the interior of the ship with their ammo, Rationalize all you want. It's still a battleship with melee combat abilities. Now we're getting somewhere... And I agree. A battleship with hands is silly. Having the cannon as a seperate vehicle has some interesting possibilities, though. But really, when you get down to it MOST humanoid vehicles are silly, regardless of how anthropomorphized they are. Transforming ones moreso(though transforming battleships score higher in my book than fighterplanes on the not-silly scale, it doesn't say much). I just get kinda tired of Mac7 bashing sometimes. Especially when it pops up at random for no reason.

Probably the same logic guiding Isamu in Macross Plus. Too many promotions and you wind up behind a desk instead of a flight stick. Also, when you get around major, you're pretty much a supervisor (in the civilian world). From there on, it gets progressively difficult to get higher. You could either impress the brass really badly, suck up to the brass or have political connections. Either way, you're on your way to a desk job. But a major comes pretty close to a desk as is... Maybe that's why Focker maintained his reputation as a devil-may-care psycho who flew dogfights while drunk... Who'd dare promote him to a desk job?

Probably the same logic guiding Isamu in Macross Plus. Too many promotions and you wind up behind a desk instead of a flight stick.

Its more like its paint chipped due to all the movements and entering the atmosphere..... But to be more anal....doesn't the color come from the phase-shift armour and not its actual color? So an actual paint chipping on blue and red wouldn't occur i imagine. It's using the prototype phase poo armor, which is defective.

The Battle 7 wasn't something new, it was a complete aberration and an insult to the Macross itself, good thing it was destroyed, too bad they were building another one..bleh.. I have 2 words for you. Daedalus Attack. You are defending a boxing battleship, you really don't have a lot of room here.

Yah... *listens* Uh-oh... I think he just fired up the dremel...

AKA responsible piracy. Steal only that which isn't available through normal channels.

Which reall ymakes no sense, given a jet engine not only requires air, but sucks it like ... ummm... something that sucks REALLY hard. The exoatmospheric testing could have just entailed test-building the fuselage with the characteristics needed to operate in a vacuum. It may also have meant physically taking a VF-0 into space and seeing if it can operate at least minimally in Gerwalk mode (which appears to use rockets in the backpack). Mmmm... Along the same lines, they may have also just been making sure that their wing design was up to the stresses the verniers were gonna be putting on it.

Okay, ummm.... eww?

Okay, now we've got some other stuff on the list. Mmmm... I think about half my MP3s are untagged. And pr'ly half of those are incomprehensible filenames too. Good thing I don't go for controlled playback. I view those as fluff, and irrelevant, personally. ... I really like that word today. I might get some mileage out of the radio, but it certainly wouldn't be a major factor. Yah. I need to rerip my CDs anyways(low bitrate encodes), and I'm considering moving up to a diffrent codec while I'm at it. ... But I'll likely put it off forever, because it's a pain. /me shrugs. I just think it's a tad over-rated. Like I said, not a bad product, just missing some features I'd expect at that price point. Honestly, I've been drooling voer the iRiver HDD players. Too bad they're iPod Photo level. That adds about a hundred bucks for a feature I don't care about. But the look and feature set are about what I want, and I've heard nothing but good things about them. If they still sold their H100 series, I'd be a very happy camper.

Which reall ymakes no sense, given a jet engine not only requires air, but sucks it like ... ummm... something that sucks REALLY hard.

Given my "playlists" consist of every file I have and a shuffle button, I prefer the fastest way to get 'em over there. Why it's not there is irrelevant to the fact that it's not there. Explaining why the sky is blue instead of green doesn't change the fact that the sky is blue. Which would be the thing to do, really. If you don't support the DRM stuff, you don't support MS's announced online music store, and there's no conflict of interest. Like I said, they didn't ban MP3s. Which is their big hot-button topic. BTW, Samsung supports OGG. And the resurrected licensed Napster download service(that no one uses). Though I do grant that as they don't actually OWN Napster, the example isn't quite the same. I was under the impression the iPod firmware wasn't upgradable. We could've saved a lot of trouble here if someone had just said "yeah it is" way back when I first said it wasn't. I think it's more like MS not fixing PNG support on MSIE(a long-promised upgrade that's never materialized). They don't really have to, so why bother doing it? GAH! I'd've SWORE that said work. I even read it multiple times, too. Sorry.

Some of the products. I dislike the company as a whole, though. Much like I dislike EA as a whole. I'd welcome some healthy competition in the OS market, but MS has it locked up pretty good. And I use full Mozilla for my browser. I very rarely pop up MSIE, but yah, a few sites just don't work right in Mozilla. Usually due to sloppy coding, sometimes because they use some idiotic MS-exclusive extension.

Cheaper-made is debatable. Sure Creative's fall apart. We've got that established pretty well here. But what about other brands? There's about a dozen out there, I'm pretty sure. Every quality comparsion has been to a Creative Labs product. And like I said, it's not just space, but features. I think the iPod is a tad light on some features it SHOULD have. I like the red/orange combo. Another fine improvement over white-on-white.

Whoawhoawhoa! You can GET PAID for that? Where's my check?

As I understand things, others can tell when you send them music, so using them as a hard drive works equally well for data warehousing AND music installation. It's certainly how I'd design one. The iRiver devices, for example, have twin USB ports. One for normal data, the other for DRM files, it looks like. For normal files, it's simple drag&drop, even if they're music. The player software just ignores any file it doesn't know how to handle. Irrelevant to the fact that it's a popular format that the iPod doesn't support and CAN'T support. Besides which, they could support unlocked WMA and not the DRM-enabled WMA files. In fact, I would ENCOURAGE such an action. DOWN WITH DRM! ... But that's another discussion all together. But if you ever WANT more, you can't have it with an iPod. Also note that if a glitch is discovered in the firmware(not likely, but possible) you can't fix it with an iPod. Umm, duh? Converting an MP3 to a better format won't get you any of the benefits, because the data is already lost. It's like converting a JPEG to a bitmap. The data lost is already gone. Chainging formats won't bring it back. Again, irrelevant to the fact that it DOESN'T support it and CAN'T support it. Besides which, I don't think the RIAA would complain that the iPod could read OGGs if they don't complain that it reads MP3s, which is what 99.99999% of the pirated stuff is available as. OGG is going to be almost exclusively the domain of people that already own the CDs. Joe Public still believes claims that a 64-meg player can hold a full CD's worth of music at reasonable quality. Joe Public can't tell the diffrence between mono and stereo most of the time, much less high-quality reproductions and low-quality ones. Joe Public knows nothing, and would buy a box of dried poop if it had an ad campaign like the iPod did. It IS to Apple's credit that they spent the money to make the iPod a decent MP3 player as well as a commercial success, but that doesn't change the fact that it's got limited features and is not upgradable. I wasn't going to, actually. But I DO notice a decided lack of IBM-compatibles at home. Work comps don't count, because you probably HAVE to use them. My opinion is that Macs are fine computers, but they don't run most of the software I want, and have a lousy price/performance ratio. Though there is a third factor, in that I enjoy playing with the hardware. All my IBM-compatibles have been home-built. I do all my own upgrades. A day spent poking around in my beige aluminum box is a good day. I don't WANT a pre-made computer, regardless of brand, architecture, or price tag... well, if it's cheap enough, I may buy it to steal parts out of(assuming it has proper expansion cards instead of integrated peripherals). On the other hand, I like playing with stuff. I've long wanted a Mac just to goof around with. But I can't really justify buying a Mac just to say I own one. ... Of course, I WAS going to spring for that 20$ Silicon Graphics workstation for that exact reason, if he hadn't sold it before I got there... So never mind. If I find a used Mac with the right price, it will probably wind up with a home. If you like Macs, more power to you. I have no problem with it. I do not believe that "Mac user" is an insult in the least. Apple makes some fine products. Their LCDs especially are second to none, and all but the most die-hard anti-Apple people have drooled over the 30" LCD. I don't even LIKE LCD monitors(I prefer something with a beter contrast ratio and more variability in resolution) and I've drooled over it. However, I think that the iPod and Mac, while fine products, are overpriced for what they are, and would prefer to spend my money elsewhere.

Wow, that's very observant. I guess we're just going to pretend cobbling together 3 unrelated anime and editing out moons and such didn't creat any MAJOR flaws in their product. BTW Myriad, that map is going to come in very handy since I just got Zelda for my GBA. Thanks Isn't that quote from the interview where he says he fixed Macross and later Macross shows are more like Robotech than Macross? And hte map would be useful if I hadn't bought the "NES Game Atlas" years ago.

So buy Sega's next game anyways. Prove everyone wrong that this is the end of video football.

Fine... a card that matches the product. At LEAST chopped out the mini-con line, as there's clearly no mini-con in there. Personally, I'd've cut/paste'd some old Jetfire box art onto it.

Uh...Gen1 which was Apple only. Gen2 was when they started selling it for Windows. You needed to use the Windows CD install for it be Windows Compatible. Gen2.5-Gen3 and up they've been PnP as long as itunes was installed on your windows machine. EXACTLY! iTunes is what we like to call extra software. It's quie easy to have a player be seen as a "removable mass storage device." AKA an external hard drive. True plug and play. No installs of anything if your OS properly supports USB mass storage devices(anything above Win98 does on the maintream side of things). Even ones that need software usually can get by with Windows Media Player, which most comps already have. I think it shipped with late versions of Win98. Furthermore, many players such as the RCA Lyras and iRivers are upgradable. You can stuff other codecs down their throats, expanding their capabilities. iPods are limited to the few formats Apple thinks you need. Yes, MP3 is everywhere. No, it's not the only option. WMA and OGG are two other popular formats iPod doesn't support, and current models CAN'T support. Ogg in particular is often looked to as an MP3 upgrade. As for aesthetics... the solid white iPod is TOO minimalist for my tastes. The U2 iPod looks nice. And the blue iPod mini is as sexy as everyone acts like the solid white one is(too bad the drie is a bit cramped for my tastes). iRiver's current HDD models give me a style I like in a size I can use, though. Yes, the iPod has good quality playback. It's among the best. But it has too many strikes against it IMO.