My friend and I spent the Memorial Day afternoon at the San Jose Doubletree Hotel for the BayCon 2006 comic book/science fiction convention.
The panel on video games was interesting considering that only one panelist showed up and someone from the audience jumped in to keep things going. I’m surprised that Nintendo a lot of positive comments after being at the bottom of the console heap for years. Of course, Microsoft and Sony are not helping themselves by pricing their new consoles at the high-end of the price range. There’s a big difference between dropping $200 USD and $600+ USD for a console.
The panel on the intent of the founding founders with author Jerry Pournelle got intense at times. The main argument was that the federal government shouldn’t regulate encryption technology since the founding fathers used ciphers to their encode messages to each other and wrote nothing about regulating ciphers. The government, of course, does want to regulate encryption to prevent being locked out of communication technology that private citizens may use to challenge its authority. The founding of the United States Constitution was my favorite part of history that I haven’t thought about in years.
After the closing ceremonies, my friend got his books signed by author Larry Niven and we went to the anime room to find our other friend. For the first time in several years, I was with my two lovely assistant lead testers who worked on my Nintendo titles at Accolade/Infogrames/Atari (same company, different owners, multiple identity crisis).