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"True again, except that we have to build giant structures with radiation shielding and artificial gravity, no easy feat."

Yes, but with automation to help we could do that. If we can learn to live in zero gravity, other possibilities open up like Marshall Savage talked about in the Millennial Project with Asgard habitats that were basically bubbles with a two meter thick layer of water at the surface between two layers of transparent plastic.
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Asgard
http://oceania.org/images/plate6.jpg
http://oceania.org/images/plate7.jpg

There are at least four ways I know of in theory to support good bone health in space (even assuming astronauts in space were not just vitamin D deficient since the RDA was ten times too low). People can wear clothes designed to provide resistance. People can live in a liquid environment that provides resistance (possibly breathing an oxygen enriched liquid) -- since whales do OK in effectively zero G. People could take (hypothetical) medicines to prevent bone loss. People could have their DNA altered.
http://www.oscomak.net/wiki/Liquid_breathing_to_resist_bone_loss

Obviously, more research is needed for all of them. The big thing is that it is not clear if mammals always need gravity for babies to develop in a healthy way. Example: http://www.welcometospaceblog.com/2011/09/babies-in-space.html

I would agree we should solve our problems on Earth first, rather than export a tragic way of thinking. Related ideas (the last two by me):
http://www.anwot.org/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

We seem to know answers to the social problems (stuff like a basic income, unschooling and life-long learning, advanced conflict resolution techniques, and so on). The problem seems more putting them into practice against entrenched interests ranging from short-sighted billionaires (of the 1%) with a narrow sense of self, to public school unions, to those who profit from war, to the rest of us (99%) and social inertia with fear of change even as our technosphere is quickly changing. I think we could easily do much better socially than this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Inside

As for scams and Rossi's Cold Fusion E-Cat device, I agree it is very suspicious -- it's just at the edge of plausibility, and he could easily dispel any doubt with some better testing. But in general, whether that pans out (we'll know soon), we have lots of energy alternatives, being developed including thorium power, hot fusion, solar PV, solar thermal, and more.
http://www.caelusgreenroom.com/2011/05/26/torresol-opens-world%E2%80%99s-first-molten-salt-c-s-p-plant-ecoseed/

I was a Senior Associate with the Space Studies Institute in the late 1980s (just meant I gave them money). I thought the space power idea was interesting then and it might have made sense then -- even though I suggested to Gerry O'Neill (I took a class with him) that we should build self-replicating space habitats instead -- he called *me* a dreamer. :-) He saw that we would have a slow industrial expansion into space driven by capitalism (which I now think is baloney because we will be moving beyond money soon enough with 3D printers and robotics and s

It's and online poll, If they are honest, it'll be the Colbert Big Ensemble for Astronomy in the Radio Spectrum. http://www.cio.com/article/489397/Will_NASA_Name_Space_Station_After_Comedian_Colbert_ (Colbert has an issue with BEARS. I think his main motivation would be to detect any extraplanetary bears way ahead of time.) http://wikiality.wikia.com/Bears

People play less these days (lack of time - damn, we get older!), and those who play the most (teenagers) usually pirate, so they want it free.

The only problem with that theory is that it does not match the evidence. The games industry keeps making more and more money every year. A lot of that increase is due to games costing way more than they used to, but it shows that there are still a lot of people paying for games.

That promotion pissed me off to no extent. Any game developer who really cared about his game wouldn't ruin the balance of gameplay with cheap marketing schemes. This guy seemed to get it right. Too bad the poor sap won't make a dime.

Dude, this is /.

The game you should have mentioned is sabacc

"The game of sabacc used a deck of seventy-six cards featuring sixty numbered cards divided into four suits, and two copies of eight special cards. Each player is dealt several cards which make up their hand, usually between two and five, depending on the set of rules in play at the table. The cards themselves are small, electronic devices with a display panel covering the surface of one side; this panel is capable of shifting the displayed suit and value of each card when told to do so by the computer running the game, or when a player has the option to manually shuffle the card's value. In this fashion, a player can receive new cards of any possible suit or rank without actually having to take new cards from the deck itself."

Apple's already going all pear shaped.

iCarly predicted this years ago.

Also,

He has never acted in any interest other than that of the computer-using public

So, it's in the interest of the computer-using public for the FSF, of which he is president, to spread FUD about Linux and Android licensing because the GPLv3 is not getting any love? Or for him to get his jollies by publicly demeaning women? Or by telling people that their time would be better spent working on patching emacs (his baby) than with their baby?

I'm not buying it. The man's actions speak very loudly - he is self-centered in the extreme - to the point where he is not able to consider any point of view other than his own as having any validity. A paranoid narcissist. In other words, a whack-pack who did NOT invent the "free software movement", contrary to his shameless self-promotion - Bill Joy was compiling and distributing BSD alsmost a decade before he even started. Bill Joy - the guy who wrote ex and vi. So it really is a vi vs emacs thing.

Stop trying to defend the indefensible - it shows the same lack of class and inability to acknowledge new information that Stallman has.

When I played, we where calling the http://eve.wikia.com/wiki/Apocalypse "The golden banana", pun intended. Quite a few EVE ships look like sex toys...

Or if some corp wants their fleet to be fabulous pink, well go ahead and buy it.

Oh gawd. An enormous fleet of Thorax ships painted as nature intended. Great going, you've just described the entirety of EVE Online - enormous flocks of space cocks that kill.

It'll probably be like that episode of American Dad.

There's always the planet jackers.

Try that with scores for NFL games. Some data is creative expression.

What about scores for NFL games? Basketball scores are non-copyrightable data, I can't imagine football being any different.

At last - crystals worthy of stargate! http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki/Control_crystal

Has anyone considered a space escalator instead of a space elevator?

Yes

I loved it too. Does anyone else know that The Incredibles was a spoof on Watchmen? Even Edna's rant is based on the death of Dollar Bill

Because News Service Europe stores the infringing posts and makes them available. The judge has to honor the law and the company has to follow it not some self appointed RFC "cancel" procedure that may or may not work. Why is it that whenever a downloader gets cought people say: go for the hosters, when a hoster gets cought go for the provider when a provider ....

An enormous FAQ on RFC cancel, cancel bots, forged cancels, cancel wars, etc. can be found here:
http://wiki.killfile.org/projects/usenet/faqs/cancel/

Unfortunately, the ability to cancel someone else's post is just too much power, so that privilege is not freely given out. Chances are, this hoster has probably turned it off. Maybe just turning it back on would be considered "following the judges orders", but it would open a lot of new problems.

A better way to fight this is using Mere Conduit, which is similar to the Safe Harbor provisions we have in the DMCA.

Sorry, he was already murdered by an enraged Lobot

This sounds like the Superintendent in Halo ODST.

Strange that there are no examples of right wing hate literature on the list. I mean with the country being overrun by freedom hating liberals and all, you would think the list would consist almost exclusivly of works by "conservative" authors.

Right, but you wouldn't expect the liberal media conspiracy to report that, now, would you?

Cookie Monster has been castrated. Cookies are a "sometimes food", and he mostly eats vegetables now.

This is a right-wing lie/urban legend:

http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Is_Cookie_Monster_now_the_Veggie_Monster%3F

It was Hoots the Owl who sang "A Cookie Is a Sometimes Food" to Cookie Monster. At the end of the song, Cookie Monster declared, "NOW is sometimes!" and gobbled the cookie anyway.

http://characters.wikia.com/wiki/Crow_T._Robot

Hah! You lose. Pay up, sucker!

I go with Yuffie personally.

Will it vaporize when you pass through an Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grill, leaving you haunted and remorseful?

Well, it worked for Mr. Burns.

I'm rather curious as to when sci-fi will become fulfilled prophecy as these companies go to war with real weapons.

Yes, Apple has already designed it's iArmy, they will be dressed in shiny white armour with highly inaccurate weapons that can only fire one shot at a time. I believe they will look something like this.

The Jedi were the guardians of the republic for either a thousand years or a thousand generations (George not keeping his units straight), and the galactic society being older than that.

It was both. :) The Jedi joined the Old Republic about 24,000 years (a thousand generations) before the Battle of Yavin. The Republic crumbled about 1100 years BBY and entered a hundred year Dark Age, which ended with the presumed "extinction" of the Sith and the rebuilding of the Republic. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_galactic_history

The different artistic talents are fine. They're not what irk fans.

1. Extended universe timeline

Many books had already been written to fill out the extended universe. (And IMHO some of them were pretty good.) All them were painstakingly cross referenced so as to not conflict with one another, and especially to not conflict with the movies. However, George Lucas has (for better or worse, your call) taken the liberty to override the fan base timeline.

Some of these changes don't cause conflicts, such as "Did Han or Greedo shoot first?". Others may, such as Droids which was orginally set 200 years before the movies (as compared to Anakin building C-3PO).

Retroactive changes have been made to fit the pieces together.

2. Star Wars style

The original movies followed a few characters as they etched their little mark in a great (pun intended) universe. This gave the Star Wars universe a feeling of being enormous and unexplored. This gave people a desire to enter that universe to see more of it, thereof the massive fanbase and extended universe.

The prequel movies were... well, episode 1 was a Disney movie with "little boy hero and his comic sidekick". Episode 2 was primarily about a romance, and episode 3 sums it up... basically they were all about Anakin. It's fine for a movie to focus on a character. The problem, I think, was that it gave the feeling that much of the "great universe" now revolved around one character (diminishing the universe), rather than following the character within this grand universe.

I believe that one of the main falldowns with alot of fiction is that worlds are built around the characters and their stories. But whenever you start by building a world, and then tell the story within that world, you tend to get a much more interesting world that readers/viewers can escape into and want more of. You don't have this problem if you write a story about "today" because "today" is already a fully fleshed out world. I think that's partly why so many people are turned off by sci-fi and fantasy, often without being aware of it.

So, does it all really matter? Well, if you mess with something that is cherished by many people, then you better mess with it responsibly, or else you shall incur the wrath of those who feel they lose out.

You mean the Terrific Trio obviously.

A better analog is the indie PC game Limbo of the Lost that stole all its backgrounds from numerous other commercial games. And the developers would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those meddling kids...

Modified T cells that kill leukemia and then grow out of control? I think I know this corporation.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 anyone?

On one mission you play as an inside CIA agent whom has infiltrated a terrorist inner circle who go on a shooting spree at an Airport. You get to mow down endless Civilians. Though the mission is skipable. And you actually succeed in the mission, even if you don't shoot anyone and just let your compadres do all the civilian killing.

See for more details: http://callofduty.wikia.com/wiki/No_Russian

Thanks to Disney and the corrupt shills that have taken over the government, games made in the 1980s won't "expire copyright" and return to the public domain until sometime after 2100. If there isn't yet ANOTHER "Mickey Mouse Protection Act" copyright extension passed in the meantime.

Part of the problem is that copyright doesn't take into account the life of the medium any more. Imagine what happens when most books are only available on e-readers and most e-readers no longer read the format the book was put out in (not so hard to imagine: think of some of the books that only exist on B&N Nook format and imagine that B&N goes under and nobody bothers to code a translator because "well most of it is on Kindle anyways", followed by B&N's servers shutting down and nobody having a remaining copy of the book anywhere).

The longer copyright terms are, the more information we LOSE to bad circumstances and bitrot. For one of the most famous cases, consider the missing episodes of Dr. Who - the BBC now has a comparatively huge bounty out for anyone who has them, even if it's a really crappy telecine.

Maybe the Monarch is taking over for Steve Jobs?

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/File:Unnews_kim_hair.jpg

Three strategies that most definitely work:
1. Don't buy a game right after it comes out (this also cuts down the price dramatically if you choose to buy it). Wait for the reviews and the like to percolate for a while, so you can get an idea of what the early adopters thought of it. Sure, it might not be as popular 2 years later, but it's still the same game.

2. Some gaming companies release demos, which is a perfectly legal way to try before you buy.

3. Alternately, scrap the commercial latest-and-greatest and just enjoy games that are available for free, like Battle for Wesnoth and FreeCiv. A lot of them are pretty good, replayable, portable across many OSes, and in some cases multi-player capable. You risk nothing but your free time, which is what you're using up to play games anyways.

That's how I do it, simply because the bleeding edge PC games usually require expensive bleeding edge hardware. A year or so down the road that bleeding edge hardware is relatively cheap.

Three strategies that most definitely work:
1. Don't buy a game right after it comes out (this also cuts down the price dramatically if you choose to buy it). Wait for the reviews and the like to percolate for a while, so you can get an idea of what the early adopters thought of it. Sure, it might not be as popular 2 years later, but it's still the same game.

2. Some gaming companies release demos, which is a perfectly legal way to try before you buy.

3. Alternately, scrap the commercial latest-and-greatest and just enjoy games that are available for free, like Battle for Wesnoth and FreeCiv. A lot of them are pretty good, replayable, portable across many OSes, and in some cases multi-player capable. You risk nothing but your free time, which is what you're using up to play games anyways.

So your claim is that a rounded rectangle is now an Apple logo? Thats a stretch by even Jobsian standards. And if its true that Apple owns the rounded rectangle despite it being a standard form factor, what exactly do you suggest other hardware makers do?

Well, there is always the Pear Phone and it's larger sibling, the Pear Pad.

For C, learn from the best, and that would be John Carmack. :)

http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom_source_code_files

Neural Net CPU

I think the terminators want their technology back. Is it time for SkyNet yet?

They're still working on smelloscope technology.

They should just use Detroit: it's already built, it's realistic and it's a lot larger than a 35,000 inhabitant city.

I'm thinking things are going to be turning around for Detroit real soon. Sarif Industries just started there a few years back, they're going to be huge.

I also hate to say it, but there is racism, too. I look around and find the indian guys trying to thumbs-down the westerners. makes me sick to even say such things but I'm finding its true. I enjoy working with indian guys but I am very much turned off by the 'take-over' that I'm seeing right before my eyes. over the last 10 years, the tech industry is flushing out western guys and making it an 'import only' field.

Situations like these aren't always an issue of racism, but of culture and control.

If you've got a situation where a group of Indian workers are dominating a portion of the company or only hiring other Indian workers, it could be a situation where the boss is able to control the employees through the fear of losing their visa or using the respect that their place in the caste system as an appeal to authority that they wouldn't otherwise have. In addition, bucking authority and trying to gain upward mobility is frowned upon in Indian culture, giving a controlling boss even more power over a team of Indian workers, whereas a Western worker is more likely to rebel against unjust authority and try to take the boss's job.

They're more able to control other Indian workers and get the Indian workers to take more punishment than their Western compatriots because, a lot of times, their Western compatriots, especially older ones who have experience in the field and know what they're doing, won't put up with a lot of their crap.

A power-hungry dictator that is using every method of control that he can will see a Western programmer as a wildcard to their empire and call a thumbs down. They've built their fiefdoms, and can legitimately tell HR that an older Western worker will cause strife among their team.

I'll hazard a guess. E1M4 (Episode 1 being the shareware version), contained a room full of supercomputers that lowered into the floor. Using the minimap (or waiting for them to lower) would reveal that they were shaped in a Swastika pattern. The map was modified in patch 1.4 to remove that pattern (see: Here )

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Midnight They already know!

Yeah. As I mentioned in another comment, the primary tactical use of these abandoned cars is as cover in a firefight... which is a bad idea, since the nuclear powerplants explode with the force of a mini-nuke warhead when the car is damaged enough.

In fact, when trapped in a firefight in a roadway or junkyard full of wrecked cars, the correct impulse is to haul ass out of the way, not stand and fight; you might survive getting shot in the back a few times (it is a game, after all), but when the cars around you start cooking off in atomic mushroom clouds, you will die.

Of course, these thorium-powered cars would never do that...

http://backtothefuture.wikia.com/wiki/File:Mrfusion.png

Damn. I was hoping I could get some of those sweet, sweet mentats.

It's a joke with lot of truth to it. My undergrad adviser said he used this model sometimes (he's 90 or so now, so probably OK to mention this). He said he would essentially get a grant for work he had already (mostly) done, and then use much of the money to do the next thing. So, you are right, it's an interesting and sometimes successful model.

A much deeper problem is that the people good at looking good may not be the same people good at doing stuff. As someone suggested recently (forget where, maybe on slashdot) that is why so many mediocre films are produced. The best directors and writers may not be the best at convincing others to give them money to make films. This is in part a function of how many lesser skilled wannabees are around and how desirable the area is. The more mature a field is, perhaps the bigger the problem?

I think that was implied in another recent slashdot article that at first glance seemed to be about how the popularity of computer programming was insuring the unemployment of true geeks. Will a true geek, even one with decent social skills, get hired when hiring managers can find a lot of very appealing people who look even more on paper like true geeks than the true geeks, and they can't tell the difference, or at least, can't tell from the information they have to work with? This is also a problem in the "Seven Samurai", how does a farmer know what makes a good Samurai? And there are so many aspects to what makes people effective, even a focus on skills and experiences can be misleading.

A completely different issue is you may be hiring the wrong type of person, or the wrong person may be doing the hiring. For example, this presentation by David Eaves suggests that big open source projects need good facilitators at the core more than they need good coders:
http://www.slideshare.net/david_a_eaves/community-management-presentation/

Still, coding skills in the case of open source may be important for a certain level of respect by the community. In general, we need better software tools for collaboration, as that presentation talks about (and thus the need for a social semantic desktop and good tools on it, including for stuff like Structured Dialogic Design and a variety of other methods for collective sensemaking and analysis and collaboration).
http://www.globalagoras.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking
http://collaboration.wikia.com/wiki/Stigmergic_collaboration

The best "manager" I ever had in a commercial setting did not know how to code that well (although he could code enough to understand the problem area and contribute to it), but he was great at managing a team well.

Another option for running a program like this is to not have applications. Just find people doing the work you like and give them money.

Still, ultimately, the best security is going to emerge from a society with things like a "basic income" to live off of so the people who like resolving these issues have the time to do so, without imposing this problematical filtering process on it. That is what is depicted in James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear" sci-fi novel. And it is backed up by research, like discussed here:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

The best motivated work comes from taking money off the table, and people having a sense of purpose, developing a sense of mastery, and having a sense of ownership/influence over what is happening.

This is all why it is so how hard to give money away well, as discussed near the end to the Seven Laws of Money

It's a planet from Star Wars of course.

// ville

From that page:

Wayland is where Emperor Palpatine's secret toy-box was. All kinds of nasty dark side things on Wayland.

I see. Wayland, the dark side of the (open) source. :-)

It's a planet from Star Wars of course.

// ville