It actually was buried in a fairly normal documentary on the early Roman Church and the first few councils. Almost as an aside when dealing with the whole issue about who wrote what book and the fierce division between the early groups on what to include and which versions/etc were valid.
Revelations was certainly written by several authors and shows many signs of being heavily edited. One of the things they pointed out was that the number had changed several times and that "666" was a later arbitrary number that didn't have any connection to anyone's name (changed to something meaningless instead of a Roman Emperor's name)
Oh - heh - I've got that about my "name" several times. It's really a made-up word what means nothing in any language. I had to come up with a name for games back in the early 90s and this one stuck out of several I tried. Basically, it is a typo based from me playing too many games of Master of Orion. Custom race - need name??? - part Meklar part Psilon(two fav races). Ended up with "Plekton"(Pleklon didn't sound right). After an online search, I found it also had no linguistic equivalent, so it was a nice online handle. This also worked nicely for StarCon II, where it asks for a ship name and gives you exactly 8 letters, max, to put in that field.
Ie - ruler - Plekto. Planet - Plekton. etc.
But yeah, means nothing. Heh. Though, being close to several words that do mean something (usually bad) makes it nice for online PVP games as well.;)
But I think that I might be onto something as well(on a serious note). If you take a look at people who have been to all-night dance/trance type concerts or raves, they look and act like they're in a daze after-wards. I know from personal experience myself, that your senses are driven to overload for so long that while you can remember what happened the day before, it seems like a fact with no emotion attached to it, since what you just went through completely saturated your short and mid-term memory.
Perhaps this could be done with some sort of music and visual effects - like a video game with a light and sound show attached. (think dance club levels and effects, though - enough to saturate your mind in a safe and controlled way)
I think the real reason for much of PTSD is likely related to noise levels. Being a musician myself, I know that there is a level where the sound drowns out all of your other senses and it's all you can think of (usually this is related to sound pressure level more than frequency, which is why it's easiest to do by turning the bass way up). This would also make sense, since much of combat and explosions and the like have very high sound pressure components to them - to the point where your brain just simply overloads and panics. And why most of the flashbacks typically have a sound-related trigger.
My educated guess is that much of it might be mitigated by specialized hearing protectors like many musicians wear. But I don't think most branches of our armed forces worry about hearing protection unless it's something like artillery or on a runway or similar. Certainly not concerning normal soldiers and the like. But there has been some work on it in the last few years, so that's encouraging. (the devices exist but aren't widely used)
I would hope that we would rather consider the meaning of the fact that the general public has an interest in reaching space again, and by doing it themselves.
People have always wanted to get into space ever since they knew that it was possible to do so.
What really seems to have happened is that people have finally realized that our government lacks the will to do it any more and so they've done what people have eventually always done in this scenario, which is to do it themselves. I'm just waiting for one of the major aerospace contractors to cut ties with The Government and do their own thing. There's certainly no money left to fund anything at this point, and likely won't be for a decade or more.
According to a show I saw on the History Channel, it was actually code for the name of the current Roman emperor (so as to get past the Roman censors). And that it changed a couple of times to slightly different numbers. The original author's point was actually a scathing commentary on any form of centralized government or empire. Which makes logical sense as well for someone under arrest for their beliefs - typical rebellious manifesto type writing. But somehow that got lost after The First Council of Nicaea and the alterations that they enforced.
If it's just shapes and stimulus and so on, perhaps having them just sit in a room with videos of Tiesto or Daft Punk or similar playing would probably saturate their brains to the point of remembering nothing at all.
On a side note, I still remember going to see the Blue Man Group three months ago more vividly than my ex's face. So I know it really can work.;)
True, but the reality also will be that the U.S. or some other power will just make the thing have an accident. If we were willing to engage in the sort of things that we did during the Cold War, our fight against governments in Central America, and so on, trust me on this - the satellite will have an "accident" within a few months. Also, there is the problem of launching it as no country favorable to the U.S. or Europe will be allowed to launch it due to political red tape.(oops - there isn't any space available, sorry). This is actually far more likely. And, of course, there is the problem that the up-links will be easy to track and spot as the typical consumer satellite dish isn't set up to broadcast in a tight, fixed pattern.
In short, they have to obtain their own country or their own access through a country that is willing to shine off the EU and North America. The trick, of course, is how to do so without being labeled a terrorist organization or something similar. I don't think it's possible in any case, as has been pointed out, the link to that country can just simply be cut in a worst-case scenario.
Any way you look at it, they simply have run out of options and fail. Time to go home and try something different. Or work on gaining a seat in their parliament next election.
Isn't this just a wish-list by NASA considering the current lack of any way to actually implement it given how Congress seems to mess things up and change their mind every term?
Until we fix this problem, we're going nowhere. We need to lock in funding and missions for a few decades instead of a a couple of years at a time. Having a bunch of idiots in Congress who know nothing about science and engineering changing the game plan more often than we change Presidents is just crazy.
Well I know for sure that the local news vans running around the city will love this technology. As it is, they have to stop and spend several minutes linking up everything. Now imagine them just parking and being online in 30 seconds. Or while still moving, even.
The common thing to do here is to mount the dish to one of the vents up on the roof(which are almost NEVER in view of the street). That way, it's a 5 minute job to remove it if it needs to be. Just loosen the mount and slide it off. Zero damage. Of course, you're out of luck unless you're on the top floor. Yet one of many reasons I never rent on the lower floors.
That's the thing. While we laughed, they stole everyone's technology and started improving upon it by basically skipping decades of R&D. They'll send a man to the moon and that's just a start. We just don't have money to compete right now(while they do), so they will pass us up in about 10 years. Possibly less.
To be perfectly blunt here, NASA's head's stance is just mirroring what's already happening in the private sector. Over the next decade or two, all of the good graduates in engineering and physics and so on will all just go over to Asia and ignore the U.S. Much like how they did during the early part of the last century when there was a mass migration of brainpower from Europe to the U.S. They always follow the money and innovation.
He knows that unless something is done, NASA is dead in the water. But the thing is, it's already too late and we might as well just pack it up and hand it over to China, since the gap is already too large to deal with unless there's an immediate change of direction.(which there won't be, and which we really can't afford).
If you think logically about what countries might want such technology, he should have waited at least until he was on a business trip over there and done something(from a don't be a total moron perspective - ethics aside, of course). You have to assume that everything that you say or do in whatever country that you are in is being recorded or filed away somewhere "just in case" there's a future problem. You and I have no secrecy or privacy. If the Government wants information on us for anything at all, we know that they will get everything from a copy of our birth certificate to how much we tipped the waitress last Friday at lunch.
So we don't do stupid things. We keep our heads down and are (for the most part, aside from complaining at places like this and maybe speeding to work and so on) good little worker drones. And we get a nice(enough) country to live in, good food, plenty of distractions and things to do from video games and concerts and so on that most of the rest of the world doesn't get to do as easily. Life's not really so bad as a result, and so 99.99% of us have a good incentive to not do stupid things that ruin it for ourselves. We work, we have families, and so on. (visit Juarez for an example of how almost half of the rest of the world lives. A PS3 is a dream over there)
Going to a potentially adversarial foreign consulate on the other hand is a sure-fire way to get yourself watched(ie - going to the Irish consulate wouldn't probably draw any attention at all) For good reason, really. You could be asking about work or visas or anything else and the chances of you pulling a stupid stunt like this are roughly zero. But China or North Korea or other places like that, you know that they are paying some person to watch the place(or in this case have an understanding with them to turn in idiots like this to keep from creating international incidents). Or he should have known.
And, of course, there had to be the moment where he calculated the risk factor before doing the crime. At least don't be an idiot and do things that automatically get you life in prison. He could have(as an example) done any number of other illegal "white collar" crimes wouldn't get you the kind of penalty espionage does. Or he could have made a small fortune legally by turning in the company to one of the various software enforcement agencies(almost every mid-size corporation isn't paying for 100% of its software) You have to wonder what went through his brain when he chose to do something that would carry such a huge penalty for so little potential profit.
Oh well, stupid people. One less in the gene pool.
No, I honestly fail to understand why people such as yourself are so enamored with the junk that the TV studios churn out. It's clear that trying to convert yet another TV show into an online experience will almost certainly fail, if for no other reason than the fact that almost every last one that has been attempted in the past has also failed. No, more like crashed and burned in a spectacular fireball. Some of them were very good shows, but they still failed. DS9, though, was basically forgettable fodder, much like Xena or EFC. They had their moments, but will be merely a footnote in TV history a decade from now. To be successful, an online game at least needs the draw and power of a motion picture or be THE SHOW that broke all the rules. And DS9 basically had no movie and was carefully constructed to be precisely withing the box(as it were). It was TV only (2 or three single characters aside) and was too long ago for any of the younger kids who actually play these types of games to be aware of.
The tie-in is a C+ at best. And that's before you get to the business model.
Nobody can show how it will be profitable or succeed. The business model looks bad on paper and is backed by a company that has a hard time getting it right when it comes to video gaming. Making it free won't solve anything. In fact, as has been shown in the past, making a MMOG free generally ruins it as the company ceases to put a real effort into maintaining and improving it in the long term. Paramount does nothing out of love. They are cold and calculating and interested in the bottom line. They think that by getting kids interested in their old material that they will generate video sales and interest in the franchise. Except that just won't work and we all know it. I can't get my son to sit down and watch current TV shows, let alone a series on video like that. He thinks that online games are fantastic, but can't be bothered at all to actually watch a video of the show that it was based upon.
Well, technically, we aren't looking for faster than LIGHT travel but faster than SPACE travel. We can't go faster than light, but we can perhaps shorten the distance. So what FTL travel will look like is nothing nothing nothing for a long time and then suddenly we can open wormholes/fold space to wherever we need to within range of our power source/device/etc.
I vaguely remember one science fiction show that also used that for teleporting, with one of the characters claiming that Trek-type teleporting was rubbish.
The basic premise is that lesser races (from a magic affinity perspective) have less power over the rings(ie - Elrond's ring in the hands of a human would be probably 1/5th as effective) and if you go far enough down the line, you get to Hobbits and the like, which are about as magical as a doorstop. But that's good as well, since they are less likely to be corrupted by them. It's the classic story of the everyman outwitting the elite and powerful. Just a thousand pages or so long;)
As for the movie's visually, I was also amazed at how close to the book they came. I'd say that 75% of it was spot-on with what I had imagined when I first read the series.
A CNC Civic beats them all, at $1.41 a gallon equivalent(site near me, filling from home is a little less than that), and a roughly 30 miles combined(24/36) for that amount of energy, you're looking at a cost of ~3.8 cents a mile(or the equivalent of about 75-80mpg versus a gallon of gasoline). Plus, it has the magic white sticker for carpool lane(the "forever" one). It works and runs exactly like a normal Civic, just with half the trunk space is all.(only negative)
Honda's been selling this for 12 years now. You can even buy a filling device to fill from home - your garage is your gas station, in effect, and so that makes the 180-260(city/highway - tank holds roughly ~7 "gallons" equivalent of CNG) mile range even less of a problem. It also qualifies(as does the home pump) for the same incentives as Hybrids, but has no limit on numbers per year like hybrids - so your rebate/refund/etc is pretty much guaranteed.
But two vehicles basically negates any costs savings.(actually costs you MORE if it's new). the EV also needs to be capable of being a primary use vehicle as well. And that means being able to handle the occasional trip to visit the relatives or 60 mile drive to the next city over to pick up something(and of course drive back without renting a hotel room).
The firm in Santa Rosa, CA is ZAP. They've been churning out a handful of cars every year for a couple of decades.
Look, if Toyota could put normal batteries in a RAV4 a decade ago and meet those three criteria, there's no reason that modern vehicles cannot. When I hear about yet another EV that's really only legal for city use or has a 60 mile range, well, people were doing that in the 1980s with converted Escorts and Beetles. With lead acid batteries and just DIY wrenching in their garage.
It's a lot like these new low-cost Solar Cells that we keep hearing about but that never make it to market.
And let's look at the Tesla. It works, but the price is so prohibitive(why use a $40,000 car as the chassis when a stripped down Aveo will work just as well?) that it's never going to sell. Top Gear did a test of the thing and while it did work, it also was so heavy that it lost every benefit OF the decision to use an Elise as the platform(hopelessly mediocre handling due to the 1000+ lbs of batteries required). They should have just used a XB or Cube or similar.
And let's look at the Leaf. It looks like it should be fantastic, but where's the range? Would it have killed them to put a small auxiliary turbine generator set on it to extend the range?(imagine a supercharger sized turbine generator - enough to extend the range to roughly 200 miles on 2 gallons of gas) The "Onboard charger" is not an auxiliary generator to extend the range, but instead is a huge and heavy inverter to allow you to plug it into your wall like an appliance(using 110V vs 220v). So close and yet so far. The battery pack is 24KWh, so basically you have a maximum drain of roughly 12-15kwh at highway speeds. That means you need an 8-12 kwh generator to get 200 mile range(or unlimited range in city driving as long as you have fuel to power the generator). 4 stroke geneators are massively inefficient, which is why I suggested a micro-sized turbine. (note - a prototype car with a 30KWH generator like this exists (CMT-380), but it misses the point. Half that would be more than enough for a typical car)
And of course, what's the real linchpin is that if you are really concerned with "going green", Honda's CNG Civic does everything correct. It does better than the hybrids, it whomps on the electrics(no toxic batteries), and it costs less to run.(approximately 80 mpg based upon CNG vs Gasoline price differences)
I'm still waiting for a proper hybrid - an EV with a small battery pack and a tiny generator to recharge them. If done right, it would fit all of the criteria and cost LESS than a typical small car.
The reason I said 200 miles and highway speeds and for sale is because the last one that could do that was about a decade ago - the Toyota EV RAV4. What shocks me is that in lieu of a real development process, these companies are basically skirting around all of the laws and regulations by classifying their vehicles as motorcycles or city only or other nonsense.
1 - it needs to be able to do 70mph like a normal ca or else it's a glorified golf cart. 2 - it needs 200+ mile range or else it's a joke. 3 - it needs to be for sale and not a 1-off by some tiny firm in Santa Rosa, CA.
And you'll notice that there's no B5 MMOG. Trying to turn such attempts at science fiction into a MMOG almost never works, even under the best of circumstances. And, no B5 also was weak and typical TV fodder, IMO. That said, all three were watchable when there wasn't much else on, but TV sci-fi and MMOGs just are a disaster waiting to happen. And in this case, doubly so.
If you can't see why those are bad ideas and why an MMO based on DS9 has the potential to be good then I think you have a problem with reasoning I think you are the only person on the planet that failed to realize that I was being sarcastic there. That just shows how focused you are on defending your precious TV show at the expense of looking at the troubles that it has as a MMOG platform.
First, young kids who know nothing of the series will not play it. There's zero tie-in. Name me the demographic under 30 that will play it in sufficient numbers to pay for the servers. I'm assuming it will be done badly, like 95% of the rest of/. readers, because of all of the factors that are NOT present and that need to be in order to have it work well enough to make money. It's like hearing about a new car from GM and being given these specs: V6, front wheel drive, 4 doors, automatic only, and knowing that 90% likely it's going to be yet another rental fleet eyesore. Paramount's computer and console franchise has yet to hit a real home run, and this is certainly coming in with a fraction of the traction and resources that the current Trek MMOG had when it was launched.
ie - their best effort to date is a "somewhat acceptable" double hit, and their next call is to tell the batter to bunt?
Combat obviously forms an integral part of many MMOs and the designers would be stupid to leave it out of this effort, but it's not the be-all-and-end-all of an MMO.
Actually, it IS. All previous space MMOGs of any type only worked at all if they were almost entirely space combat related. I'd say planet or similar missions would work as well, but given how the current Trek MMOG handles it, and then compressing it to one planet that in the show had no real wars or conflicts other than boring political backstabbing that doesn't translate to a MMOG hardly at all, and you're left entirely with two options - station grinds that simulate security or other issues to "fix", or space combat.
The genre expects mostly space combat and the kids today all expect it. And most of the adults who remember the series who MIGHT play it instead of something else also expect it.
Considering the number of people that survived Hiroshima as well as the fact that Iran's first bomb will be fairly small, low tech, and their missiles are fairly primitive(need about half a dozen to make sure one gets through), this sort of thinking honestly just doesn't work on so many levels. No matter how hard you want it to be so to fuel your conspiracy theories, Iran has zero real interest in anything other than making a lot of noise. Certainly not in doing something that will result in almost all of their population dying in a trade for half of Israel's and most of the Palestinians in Gaza.
I'm sorry but you're spouting your opinion like it's fact. I'm well under 40 now and was obviously much younger when DS9 came out. I enjoyed the show and so did many of my friends that were Star Trek fans. The first series was admittedly a little slow, but got better as time went on. Towards the end of the DS9 run the Dominion storyline was excellent and truly gripping.
But the thing is, almost nobody who wasn't already a huge fan of the previous series actually gave a damn about DS9. It was purely a means to continue the franchise and aside from that, it had the same horrendous production, scripting, and plots as most TV series of the era. The story at the end was mildly interesting, but it was too little, too late. And even then, it was interesting mostly because there was *fighting*. But even the Trek fans that I know loathe the ending episode almost universally, so there's that, too, as a rancid cherry on top of a series that Paramount put half the effort into it that it should have.
In any case, translating all of that into a MMOG? I know! How about a Knight Rider MMOG? Or a MMOG of Friends?
See, some shows are just simply unusable for a MMOG type of environment. 95%+ of game studios know this and will tell the developer that their latest and greatest brain-fart by their CEO/Board is garbage that fails to generate income(free?), hit the MMOG demographic age groups(30+?), and lacks plot(one station by itself?), and options for play enhancement(station-based grinds?). But Apparently Paramount is smoking its own press releases lately and wants to go ahead with it anyways and continue to bleed the Trek franchise for every last penny that it can. Paramount also has a fairly horrendous track record with Trek games. They have far more misses than hits.
Every game studio should hire a few focus groups composed of 11-18 year old children. If they won't play it, don't even bother releasing it. This is the one inescapable mistake. They just released a reboot of the series and their current MMOG based upon it isn't so bad. So why waste time and money going after people a generation older?
Exactly. Given the current economic woes, Paramount simply won't spend 10 million+ in development costs to make a proper game. They will instead do the minimum amount of work for the least amount of money. Especially since it is to be a "free" game. This is why you know that it will be a very poor MMOG.
**** I'll leave it to the readers to think how a game set around a single space station could still be made interesting. Here's a hint: you might be able to leave the area of space around Deep Space Nine and fly to other places.
Outer space MMOGs only work if they are mostly about combat or offer a lot of systems and areas to explore. A single station space MMOG by design cannot really do either. So that means it's going to be reduced to the play mechanics of Pokemon or similar and maybe a lot of chat rooms. Stuff like buying your own store on The Promenade. Joy.
Slashdot Mirror
It actually was buried in a fairly normal documentary on the early Roman Church and the first few councils. Almost as an aside when dealing with the whole issue about who wrote what book and the fierce division between the early groups on what to include and which versions/etc were valid.
Revelations was certainly written by several authors and shows many signs of being heavily edited. One of the things they pointed out was that the number had changed several times and that "666" was a later arbitrary number that didn't have any connection to anyone's name (changed to something meaningless instead of a Roman Emperor's name)
Oh - heh - I've got that about my "name" several times. It's really a made-up word what means nothing in any language. I had to come up with a name for games back in the early 90s and this one stuck out of several I tried. Basically, it is a typo based from me playing too many games of Master of Orion. Custom race - need name??? - part Meklar part Psilon(two fav races). Ended up with "Plekton"(Pleklon didn't sound right). After an online search, I found it also had no linguistic equivalent, so it was a nice online handle. This also worked nicely for StarCon II, where it asks for a ship name and gives you exactly 8 letters, max, to put in that field.
Ie - ruler - Plekto. Planet - Plekton. etc.
But yeah, means nothing. Heh. Though, being close to several words that do mean something (usually bad) makes it nice for online PVP games as well. ;)
Yeah, no love for Smurfs here... ;)
But I think that I might be onto something as well(on a serious note). If you take a look at people who have been to all-night dance/trance type concerts or raves, they look and act like they're in a daze after-wards. I know from personal experience myself, that your senses are driven to overload for so long that while you can remember what happened the day before, it seems like a fact with no emotion attached to it, since what you just went through completely saturated your short and mid-term memory.
Perhaps this could be done with some sort of music and visual effects - like a video game with a light and sound show attached. (think dance club levels and effects, though - enough to saturate your mind in a safe and controlled way)
I think the real reason for much of PTSD is likely related to noise levels. Being a musician myself, I know that there is a level where the sound drowns out all of your other senses and it's all you can think of (usually this is related to sound pressure level more than frequency, which is why it's easiest to do by turning the bass way up). This would also make sense, since much of combat and explosions and the like have very high sound pressure components to them - to the point where your brain just simply overloads and panics. And why most of the flashbacks typically have a sound-related trigger.
My educated guess is that much of it might be mitigated by specialized hearing protectors like many musicians wear. But I don't think most branches of our armed forces worry about hearing protection unless it's something like artillery or on a runway or similar. Certainly not concerning normal soldiers and the like. But there has been some work on it in the last few years, so that's encouraging. (the devices exist but aren't widely used)
I would hope that we would rather consider the meaning of the fact that the general public has an interest in reaching space again, and by doing it themselves.
People have always wanted to get into space ever since they knew that it was possible to do so.
What really seems to have happened is that people have finally realized that our government lacks the will to do it any more and so they've done what people have eventually always done in this scenario, which is to do it themselves. I'm just waiting for one of the major aerospace contractors to cut ties with The Government and do their own thing. There's certainly no money left to fund anything at this point, and likely won't be for a decade or more.
According to a show I saw on the History Channel, it was actually code for the name of the current Roman emperor (so as to get past the Roman censors). And that it changed a couple of times to slightly different numbers. The original author's point was actually a scathing commentary on any form of centralized government or empire. Which makes logical sense as well for someone under arrest for their beliefs - typical rebellious manifesto type writing. But somehow that got lost after The First Council of Nicaea and the alterations that they enforced.
If it's just shapes and stimulus and so on, perhaps having them just sit in a room with videos of Tiesto or Daft Punk or similar playing would probably saturate their brains to the point of remembering nothing at all.
On a side note, I still remember going to see the Blue Man Group three months ago more vividly than my ex's face. So I know it really can work. ;)
So what exactly would be the outcome of a crash test where the car takes out the wall and keeps going?
True, but the reality also will be that the U.S. or some other power will just make the thing have an accident. If we were willing to engage in the sort of things that we did during the Cold War, our fight against governments in Central America, and so on, trust me on this - the satellite will have an "accident" within a few months. Also, there is the problem of launching it as no country favorable to the U.S. or Europe will be allowed to launch it due to political red tape.(oops - there isn't any space available, sorry). This is actually far more likely. And, of course, there is the problem that the up-links will be easy to track and spot as the typical consumer satellite dish isn't set up to broadcast in a tight, fixed pattern.
In short, they have to obtain their own country or their own access through a country that is willing to shine off the EU and North America. The trick, of course, is how to do so without being labeled a terrorist organization or something similar. I don't think it's possible in any case, as has been pointed out, the link to that country can just simply be cut in a worst-case scenario.
Any way you look at it, they simply have run out of options and fail. Time to go home and try something different. Or work on gaining a seat in their parliament next election.
Isn't this just a wish-list by NASA considering the current lack of any way to actually implement it given how Congress seems to mess things up and change their mind every term?
Until we fix this problem, we're going nowhere. We need to lock in funding and missions for a few decades instead of a a couple of years at a time. Having a bunch of idiots in Congress who know nothing about science and engineering changing the game plan more often than we change Presidents is just crazy.
Well I know for sure that the local news vans running around the city will love this technology. As it is, they have to stop and spend several minutes linking up everything. Now imagine them just parking and being online in 30 seconds. Or while still moving, even.
The common thing to do here is to mount the dish to one of the vents up on the roof(which are almost NEVER in view of the street). That way, it's a 5 minute job to remove it if it needs to be. Just loosen the mount and slide it off. Zero damage. Of course, you're out of luck unless you're on the top floor. Yet one of many reasons I never rent on the lower floors.
That's the thing. While we laughed, they stole everyone's technology and started improving upon it by basically skipping decades of R&D. They'll send a man to the moon and that's just a start. We just don't have money to compete right now(while they do), so they will pass us up in about 10 years. Possibly less.
To be perfectly blunt here, NASA's head's stance is just mirroring what's already happening in the private sector. Over the next decade or two, all of the good graduates in engineering and physics and so on will all just go over to Asia and ignore the U.S. Much like how they did during the early part of the last century when there was a mass migration of brainpower from Europe to the U.S. They always follow the money and innovation.
He knows that unless something is done, NASA is dead in the water. But the thing is, it's already too late and we might as well just pack it up and hand it over to China, since the gap is already too large to deal with unless there's an immediate change of direction.(which there won't be, and which we really can't afford).
If you think logically about what countries might want such technology, he should have waited at least until he was on a business trip over there and done something(from a don't be a total moron perspective - ethics aside, of course). You have to assume that everything that you say or do in whatever country that you are in is being recorded or filed away somewhere "just in case" there's a future problem. You and I have no secrecy or privacy. If the Government wants information on us for anything at all, we know that they will get everything from a copy of our birth certificate to how much we tipped the waitress last Friday at lunch.
So we don't do stupid things. We keep our heads down and are (for the most part, aside from complaining at places like this and maybe speeding to work and so on) good little worker drones. And we get a nice(enough) country to live in, good food, plenty of distractions and things to do from video games and concerts and so on that most of the rest of the world doesn't get to do as easily. Life's not really so bad as a result, and so 99.99% of us have a good incentive to not do stupid things that ruin it for ourselves. We work, we have families, and so on. (visit Juarez for an example of how almost half of the rest of the world lives. A PS3 is a dream over there)
Going to a potentially adversarial foreign consulate on the other hand is a sure-fire way to get yourself watched(ie - going to the Irish consulate wouldn't probably draw any attention at all) For good reason, really. You could be asking about work or visas or anything else and the chances of you pulling a stupid stunt like this are roughly zero. But China or North Korea or other places like that, you know that they are paying some person to watch the place(or in this case have an understanding with them to turn in idiots like this to keep from creating international incidents). Or he should have known.
And, of course, there had to be the moment where he calculated the risk factor before doing the crime. At least don't be an idiot and do things that automatically get you life in prison. He could have(as an example) done any number of other illegal "white collar" crimes wouldn't get you the kind of penalty espionage does. Or he could have made a small fortune legally by turning in the company to one of the various software enforcement agencies(almost every mid-size corporation isn't paying for 100% of its software) You have to wonder what went through his brain when he chose to do something that would carry such a huge penalty for so little potential profit.
Oh well, stupid people. One less in the gene pool.
No, I honestly fail to understand why people such as yourself are so enamored with the junk that the TV studios churn out. It's clear that trying to convert yet another TV show into an online experience will almost certainly fail, if for no other reason than the fact that almost every last one that has been attempted in the past has also failed. No, more like crashed and burned in a spectacular fireball. Some of them were very good shows, but they still failed. DS9, though, was basically forgettable fodder, much like Xena or EFC. They had their moments, but will be merely a footnote in TV history a decade from now. To be successful, an online game at least needs the draw and power of a motion picture or be THE SHOW that broke all the rules. And DS9 basically had no movie and was carefully constructed to be precisely withing the box(as it were). It was TV only (2 or three single characters aside) and was too long ago for any of the younger kids who actually play these types of games to be aware of.
The tie-in is a C+ at best. And that's before you get to the business model.
Nobody can show how it will be profitable or succeed. The business model looks bad on paper and is backed by a company that has a hard time getting it right when it comes to video gaming. Making it free won't solve anything. In fact, as has been shown in the past, making a MMOG free generally ruins it as the company ceases to put a real effort into maintaining and improving it in the long term. Paramount does nothing out of love. They are cold and calculating and interested in the bottom line. They think that by getting kids interested in their old material that they will generate video sales and interest in the franchise. Except that just won't work and we all know it. I can't get my son to sit down and watch current TV shows, let alone a series on video like that. He thinks that online games are fantastic, but can't be bothered at all to actually watch a video of the show that it was based upon.
Well, technically, we aren't looking for faster than LIGHT travel but faster than SPACE travel. We can't go faster than light, but we can perhaps shorten the distance. So what FTL travel will look like is nothing nothing nothing for a long time and then suddenly we can open wormholes/fold space to wherever we need to within range of our power source/device/etc.
I vaguely remember one science fiction show that also used that for teleporting, with one of the characters claiming that Trek-type teleporting was rubbish.
The basic premise is that lesser races (from a magic affinity perspective) have less power over the rings(ie - Elrond's ring in the hands of a human would be probably 1/5th as effective) and if you go far enough down the line, you get to Hobbits and the like, which are about as magical as a doorstop. But that's good as well, since they are less likely to be corrupted by them. It's the classic story of the everyman outwitting the elite and powerful. Just a thousand pages or so long ;)
As for the movie's visually, I was also amazed at how close to the book they came. I'd say that 75% of it was spot-on with what I had imagined when I first read the series.
A CNC Civic beats them all, at $1.41 a gallon equivalent(site near me, filling from home is a little less than that), and a roughly 30 miles combined(24/36) for that amount of energy, you're looking at a cost of ~3.8 cents a mile(or the equivalent of about 75-80mpg versus a gallon of gasoline). Plus, it has the magic white sticker for carpool lane(the "forever" one). It works and runs exactly like a normal Civic, just with half the trunk space is all.(only negative)
Honda's been selling this for 12 years now. You can even buy a filling device to fill from home - your garage is your gas station, in effect, and so that makes the 180-260(city/highway - tank holds roughly ~7 "gallons" equivalent of CNG) mile range even less of a problem. It also qualifies(as does the home pump) for the same incentives as Hybrids, but has no limit on numbers per year like hybrids - so your rebate/refund/etc is pretty much guaranteed.
http://automobiles.honda.com/civic-gx/
$25K (not including tax incentives) and a lot better than a Prius if you want to really "go green".
But two vehicles basically negates any costs savings.(actually costs you MORE if it's new). the EV also needs to be capable of being a primary use vehicle as well. And that means being able to handle the occasional trip to visit the relatives or 60 mile drive to the next city over to pick up something(and of course drive back without renting a hotel room).
The firm in Santa Rosa, CA is ZAP. They've been churning out a handful of cars every year for a couple of decades.
Look, if Toyota could put normal batteries in a RAV4 a decade ago and meet those three criteria, there's no reason that modern vehicles cannot. When I hear about yet another EV that's really only legal for city use or has a 60 mile range, well, people were doing that in the 1980s with converted Escorts and Beetles. With lead acid batteries and just DIY wrenching in their garage.
It's a lot like these new low-cost Solar Cells that we keep hearing about but that never make it to market.
And let's look at the Tesla. It works, but the price is so prohibitive(why use a $40,000 car as the chassis when a stripped down Aveo will work just as well?) that it's never going to sell. Top Gear did a test of the thing and while it did work, it also was so heavy that it lost every benefit OF the decision to use an Elise as the platform(hopelessly mediocre handling due to the 1000+ lbs of batteries required). They should have just used a XB or Cube or similar.
And let's look at the Leaf. It looks like it should be fantastic, but where's the range? Would it have killed them to put a small auxiliary turbine generator set on it to extend the range?(imagine a supercharger sized turbine generator - enough to extend the range to roughly 200 miles on 2 gallons of gas) The "Onboard charger" is not an auxiliary generator to extend the range, but instead is a huge and heavy inverter to allow you to plug it into your wall like an appliance(using 110V vs 220v). So close and yet so far. The battery pack is 24KWh, so basically you have a maximum drain of roughly 12-15kwh at highway speeds. That means you need an 8-12 kwh generator to get 200 mile range(or unlimited range in city driving as long as you have fuel to power the generator). 4 stroke geneators are massively inefficient, which is why I suggested a micro-sized turbine.
(note - a prototype car with a 30KWH generator like this exists (CMT-380), but it misses the point. Half that would be more than enough for a typical car)
And of course, what's the real linchpin is that if you are really concerned with "going green", Honda's CNG Civic does everything correct. It does better than the hybrids, it whomps on the electrics(no toxic batteries), and it costs less to run.(approximately 80 mpg based upon CNG vs Gasoline price differences)
I'm still waiting for a proper hybrid - an EV with a small battery pack and a tiny generator to recharge them. If done right, it would fit all of the criteria and cost LESS than a typical small car.
The reason I said 200 miles and highway speeds and for sale is because the last one that could do that was about a decade ago - the Toyota EV RAV4. What shocks me is that in lieu of a real development process, these companies are basically skirting around all of the laws and regulations by classifying their vehicles as motorcycles or city only or other nonsense.
1 - it needs to be able to do 70mph like a normal ca or else it's a glorified golf cart.
2 - it needs 200+ mile range or else it's a joke.
3 - it needs to be for sale and not a 1-off by some tiny firm in Santa Rosa, CA.
And you'll notice that there's no B5 MMOG. Trying to turn such attempts at science fiction into a MMOG almost never works, even under the best of circumstances. And, no B5 also was weak and typical TV fodder, IMO. That said, all three were watchable when there wasn't much else on, but TV sci-fi and MMOGs just are a disaster waiting to happen. And in this case, doubly so.
If you can't see why those are bad ideas and why an MMO based on DS9 has the potential to be good then I think you have a problem with reasoning
I think you are the only person on the planet that failed to realize that I was being sarcastic there. That just shows how focused you are on defending your precious TV show at the expense of looking at the troubles that it has as a MMOG platform.
First, young kids who know nothing of the series will not play it. There's zero tie-in. Name me the demographic under 30 that will play it in sufficient numbers to pay for the servers. I'm assuming it will be done badly, like 95% of the rest of /. readers, because of all of the factors that are NOT present and that need to be in order to have it work well enough to make money. It's like hearing about a new car from GM and being given these specs: V6, front wheel drive, 4 doors, automatic only, and knowing that 90% likely it's going to be yet another rental fleet eyesore. Paramount's computer and console franchise has yet to hit a real home run, and this is certainly coming in with a fraction of the traction and resources that the current Trek MMOG had when it was launched.
ie - their best effort to date is a "somewhat acceptable" double hit, and their next call is to tell the batter to bunt?
Combat obviously forms an integral part of many MMOs and the designers would be stupid to leave it out of this effort, but it's not the be-all-and-end-all of an MMO.
Actually, it IS. All previous space MMOGs of any type only worked at all if they were almost entirely space combat related. I'd say planet or similar missions would work as well, but given how the current Trek MMOG handles it, and then compressing it to one planet that in the show had no real wars or conflicts other than boring political backstabbing that doesn't translate to a MMOG hardly at all, and you're left entirely with two options - station grinds that simulate security or other issues to "fix", or space combat.
The genre expects mostly space combat and the kids today all expect it. And most of the adults who remember the series who MIGHT play it instead of something else also expect it.
Considering the number of people that survived Hiroshima as well as the fact that Iran's first bomb will be fairly small, low tech, and their missiles are fairly primitive(need about half a dozen to make sure one gets through), this sort of thinking honestly just doesn't work on so many levels. No matter how hard you want it to be so to fuel your conspiracy theories, Iran has zero real interest in anything other than making a lot of noise. Certainly not in doing something that will result in almost all of their population dying in a trade for half of Israel's and most of the Palestinians in Gaza.
I'm sorry but you're spouting your opinion like it's fact. I'm well under 40 now and was obviously much younger when DS9 came out. I enjoyed the show and so did many of my friends that were Star Trek fans. The first series was admittedly a little slow, but got better as time went on. Towards the end of the DS9 run the Dominion storyline was excellent and truly gripping.
But the thing is, almost nobody who wasn't already a huge fan of the previous series actually gave a damn about DS9. It was purely a means to continue the franchise and aside from that, it had the same horrendous production, scripting, and plots as most TV series of the era. The story at the end was mildly interesting, but it was too little, too late. And even then, it was interesting mostly because there was *fighting*. But even the Trek fans that I know loathe the ending episode almost universally, so there's that, too, as a rancid cherry on top of a series that Paramount put half the effort into it that it should have.
In any case, translating all of that into a MMOG? I know! How about a Knight Rider MMOG? Or a MMOG of Friends?
See, some shows are just simply unusable for a MMOG type of environment. 95%+ of game studios know this and will tell the developer that their latest and greatest brain-fart by their CEO/Board is garbage that fails to generate income(free?), hit the MMOG demographic age groups(30+?), and lacks plot(one station by itself?), and options for play enhancement(station-based grinds?). But Apparently Paramount is smoking its own press releases lately and wants to go ahead with it anyways and continue to bleed the Trek franchise for every last penny that it can. Paramount also has a fairly horrendous track record with Trek games. They have far more misses than hits.
Every game studio should hire a few focus groups composed of 11-18 year old children. If they won't play it, don't even bother releasing it. This is the one inescapable mistake. They just released a reboot of the series and their current MMOG based upon it isn't so bad. So why waste time and money going after people a generation older?
Exactly. Given the current economic woes, Paramount simply won't spend 10 million+ in development costs to make a proper game. They will instead do the minimum amount of work for the least amount of money. Especially since it is to be a "free" game. This is why you know that it will be a very poor MMOG.
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I'll leave it to the readers to think how a game set around a single space station could still be made interesting. Here's a hint: you might be able to leave the area of space around Deep Space Nine and fly to other places.
Outer space MMOGs only work if they are mostly about combat or offer a lot of systems and areas to explore. A single station space MMOG by design cannot really do either. So that means it's going to be reduced to the play mechanics of Pokemon or similar and maybe a lot of chat rooms. Stuff like buying your own store on The Promenade. Joy.