Hank Chien Reclaims Donkey Kong High Score 122
An anonymous reader writes "If you can say anything about Hank Chien, it's that he evidently doesn't take defeat very well. Sure, he knew not so deep down that his Donkey Kong World Record score wouldn't last forever, but he couldn't have foreseen that it would have been toppled so quickly. Twice, even. But he also knew that more Kong competition would be coming his way; namely Richie Knucklez Kong-Off in March. So Hank had something to prove, and prove he did. Scoring a massive 1,068,000 points in less than three hours, Hank has officially reclaimed the high score in Nintendo’s 1981 arcade classic."
My Hero (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:My Hero (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess it was on like Donkey Kong (tm)...
Anyway, goes to show that even if you're an old geezer, you still have the reflexes to beat some young punks...
Re:This why Rome fell (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh ... bread and circuses was not the reason Rome fell, just one of many reasons.
And I think you quite miss the point of the effect of "bread and circuses" contributing to the fall of Rome. It was because millions [archive.org] in taxpayer money were being spent on bread and circuses (like a form of dole) for the non-working poor, and this had economic effects (obviously) when combined with other factors.
When the US government starts spending millions of taxpayer money on Donkey Kong contests, then we can worry about it the role old computer games have on the destruction of modern civilization.
The only thing you could say here, really, is that this may be a symptom of overall decay, not a reason.
Re:This why Rome fell (Score:4, Insightful)
Sod contests for old games. We have popularity contests beamed to your own personal section of the planet so you can judge people remotely using buttons without having to get out of the chair. We have people who've never touched soil eating nutritional balanced, rich, processed food every single day. We have people who spend most of their time tapping buttons to post ignored opinions on global virtual messageboards that nobody ever reads again.
There are any number of ways of not being productive. The better we are at doing things like growing food and producing things that save time, the more time we have to deliberately do nothing at all. 100 years ago, nobody had TIME to spend 8 hours a day updating their friends about what they did that day, even if those friends lived in the same house.
People doing nothing is actually a sign of how easy it is to stay alive with modern equipment and infrastructure and how little knowledge is required to survive in that atmosphere (I have absolutely no idea/experience about how to grow enough food to feed my family... do you?).
That said, I do think that this is hardly "news" even for a geek. So the guy got a new highscore in an old game. Good for him. And he probably spent months dreaming about the damn game, destroying his muscles and turning his mind to mush in order to achieve that "fame". That's his problem. In my entire life, I can't imagine it ever taking more than a second to acknowledge, even if I *was* interested in the exact area we're discussing. But yet I can afford five minutes to say what a waste of time it is. Modern life, eh? Truly wonderful. :-)
Sorry to break your bullshit bubble... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry to break your bullshit bubble, but Rome had its first gladiatorial combats in 310 BC, according to Livy, and yes often accompanied to distributing food to the poor. Not only it wasn't the beginning of the end, but it was followed by its most rapid expansion centuries. In the couple of centuries after those, Rome went from being a debatable leader of a leader of city states spanning barely half of Italy to an empire sprawled all around the Mediterranean, not to mention most of modern France and half of Britain.
If anything, historians from the era tend to agree that sponsoring lavish shows to boost morale actually served well to do just that, and helped Rome rebound after such massive defeats as Canae and emerge more powerful than ever before.
It would be more than 500 years after that, or still almost three centuries even after the peak of the popularity of gladiatorial combats in the 1st century BC, that Rome even started to decline. And almost 800 years after that, in 476 AD that the Western Empire fell.
Even if you want to go for a post hoc, ergo propter hoc [wikipedia.org] fallacy to associate the two, actually Rome fell shortly after they _stopped_ holding gladiatorial combats. So, hmm, maybe actually the bad sign is when you can't even afford to have fun any more?
So, sorry, but linking such shows to Rome's decline is fucking idiotic. If you want to make a historical case, do read some history first.
Re:This why Rome fell (Score:5, Insightful)
Good illustration. That's 34,000 man-years. 34,000 men for a year, or one man for 34,000 years (i.e. about 500 lifetimes). The pyramids didn't need that. The Apollo missions probably didn't need that. Most of modern physics and mathematics could have been discovered in that (it's like Archimedes still being alive and just as productive right through to the current day, and still only one-sixteenth of the way of the way through his useful working life).
To put it in context, though, going to the toilet takes much more time than that, per person, over the course of a single life (so multiplied by 6 billion, it's quite a lot of total "wasted man-hours"). We waste inordinate amounts of time doing silly things that aren't strictly necessary, too. Productivity can only be measured on a personal level, not a numerical one. Was Alexander Fleming productive enough (or incited enough productivity in others through his discoveries) even if he was also an accomplished glass-blower? (And that actually helped him make further discoveries in unrelated fields). How do you measure something like that? And how much do we waste in actual wars? I bet it's orders-of-magnitude more, given the budget allocated to it (and thus the tax etc. used to generate it, and the work used to generate that, etc. etc. etc.).
Adding it up, it's a waste of time that could theoretically be used doing better things. On a personal level? Fuck off, I want to play Counterstrike sometimes to rest and actually have a life, not be a machine. Both points of view are equally valid. Neither will ever change except in small details. And posting on Slashdot to complain about it, like the OP did, is probably the *greatest* hypocrisy ever. Let's take five minutes to hit buttons to send a comment over thousands of km of copper and infrastructure so that lots of other people can ignore it and nobody ever benefit from it.
Re:Sorry to break your bullshit bubble... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's certainly more supportable than the opposite "OMG, we're going to hell because some people have fun" theory. Though still in a fallacious way.
But mostly it just shows that if you just hand-pick a pair of events connected only by chronology, you can argue just about anything. E.g., Rome expanded the quickest after they introduced crucifixion (learned from the Carthaginians actually, with the cross-bar being a Roman twist) and imploded the fastest after Constantine abolished crucifixion. So, hmm, maybe that's the real key to building a successful empire ;)
I'm ok with that too, actually, but then really I expect such people to not use pseudo-history for their canned moralizing points.
Re:The economic aspects of Rome are more complex (Score:2, Insightful)