What is the "other" section consists off? Jedi, FSM, est..?
Then they are not religious in the traditional sense and suddenly "atheism in respect to any major religion" climbs to number two after the Christians. Moreover I have never seen an unbiased statistics about the only country I can speak off with authority – my own. According to the CIA fact book everyone in my country who belongs to the majority ethnic group (white Caucasian) is Orthodox Christian. Well, at least from my generation more than half are atheists and among everyone else not everyone is Christian. I think the greatest public secret of religion is that one, it loses ground unless extreme peer pressure and violence is used and two, many of those that belong to a particular church follow because of tradition, fashion or conformism, not so much from actual belief. And anyway, can you say that you have a true believer unless he/she is prepared to give his/her life and the lives of anyone (if deemed necessary) for your God? How many such people are out there? What was the saying? If God tells you to kill your kids and you don't, you are an atheist. If you do, you are a madman that should be locked away.
The only time I saw porn on the tubes is when I went looking for it! And as every modern citizen I use the net daily...porn is not "in your face"!
Now, regarding the fact that every product in this world seems to be promoted by half-naked women - on this I agree with the legislation - it is in my face and I won't miss it if it's gone. The same for the models advertizing clothes that have less meat on them than prisoners in concentration camp...ugh, that is ugly and in my face daily!
Conclusion - the porn business is the least "in your face" compared to almost every other business when it comes to throwing naked flesh on billboards, newspapers, magazines and the internet.
And neither you or the once above mentioned that Carry is manic depressive. She was one of the stars in Stephen Fry's documentary aboout manic depressives. Perhaps the drugs and the drinks are consequience? She is at the moment on tons of medication and barely behaves normally. I am so sorry that he life turned that way...
It's mainly because people were so convinced by the cold war 'nuclear terror' campaigns run by the west (and probably the other side also) that they cannot see past that.
No, the other side did not run a scare campaign against nuclear power. On the contrary - the "peaceful atom" was hailed as one of the key technologies to achieve the Communist ideal, which in its purest form means the basic necessities of life are granted by birthright to everyone. In fact the sci-fi dream of many. I do not know a single person from my generation and my country that is afraid of nuclear energy.
Guess if your (very insightful) comment will make it to the news, so to speak? Whereas the comment you reply to will be on every first page in...hm..the first world. In fact they can, and will do better - "TPB supporting N Korea's nuclear weapons program".
I, for one, want to see this happen just so that the front page of the TPB will read - "DMCA this".
I think I posted this once here for a different discussion. Imagine two villages - A and B. The people from A for whatever reason - genetics or behavior (or both) are afraid of wolves/dogs more than the people from village B. Village B over time domesticates few wolves and village A does not. Village B now has evolutionary advantage. fast forward - over time, people who cannot be "domesticated" by the wolves disappear just as wolves that cannot be domesticated by humans disappear. The process goes two ways. Usually we ascribe the "intention" to the human side only, because of the wide-spread fallacy that you need "intention" for the evolutionary process to happen...
Alas, you are so right. Some documents came to light after the fall of the wall in my motherland and I was stupid enough to read them. Lost my sleep for quite a while..
Well, I was involved in decision making at work about the effect of temperature on work performance. What I learned during the research phase was that way before global warming was an issue people have been studying the subject vigorously. After all, many a legislation is in effect that regulates those things in any decent country. The first google hit in English [http://www.iaqscience.lbl.gov/performance-temp-office.html] shows that 10% decrease is easily achievable over 5 deg Fahrenheit from the optimal value. At work we really had an issue with this and the negative effects on performance were visible to all of us.
The other thing is that we talk about change of temperature. Change. There is a rate of this change and a rate at which our bodies can adapt. I am from a continental, -20 to +40 Celsius country and I live and work for a long time now in the Netherlands. So at work I was not disturbed much by the high temperature. Other colleagues from warm countries were likewise almost unaffected. The Dutch were affected much more strongly. On the other hand they withstand the lack of sunshine, especially in winter, much lither than me and the other southerners. Work and population in NL is the densest along the coast. High temperature here combined with high humidity makes live hell (ain't New York like this too?). I will take 40 deg back home against 35 in Amsterdam any day.
Put aside the debate about the origin and the rate of global warming. Is higher global temperature going to decrease work performance? - yes. Equally around the globe (assuming the same average temperature increase)? - no. Can we expect local extremities due to specific response of the local weather to the hotter climate? - yes (see humidity example above). Are we going to be able to adapt (physiologically-wise and fast enough) to the change? - probably not. Judging by the trouble the rest of the ecosystem has adapting to the already observed increase of temperature we (sans technology) would find it very difficult too. So we will have to spend even more energy for cooling and drying at work and home? - yes.
Without taking any side in the pro-anti flue vaccine debate, my anecdotal evidence is that every 3 years on average I get the flu in September. There follows a week of pain and misery and then nothing for another few years. During the winter months when all coworkers go down like flies I have some sniffles and bit of cold sweating and that is all even if they cough up in my face.
So it seems to me that the body is very capable of upgrading its immune system and it lasts for more than a year. Of course the problem is that I am barely 40. Not sure how easy the "upgrades" will be say after 20 years. I can imagine that a weak body might not survive it. However, most elderly people in my country get no flu vaccines because they are too poor. I have never heard of anyone dying of flu yet in the village where my relatives live and with a population of a few thousand (mostly elderly people) nothing remains a secret so I'd know (well, my mom would know and tell me).
Another funfact is that most of my coworkers do get the shots 'cause they got kids and they still cannot avoid it. Especially the one that upgrades me - I get it always in September because I spend all my vacation every year going to the same place (the poor village I mentioned above) at the same time. And then on the way back, like clockwork every few years, I start getting bad during the flight and because I always fly on Friday I am down during the weekend and most of the following week. However once I went to work on the Monday and transmitted the thing to my coworkers. Hell broke loose! We have an agreement with my boss now should I get again the "east European flu" I simply stay the whole week at home.
Thus, I will not get any shots myself for the foreseeable future as I definitely do not need them. But it seems the issue is rather complicated and the present day mobility of people only increases the risk.
Of course, if we can, we should back-up our species to at least a few more planets. But we should not, IMO, aim to occupy ALL the living space denying it to other civilizations, present and future. Based on science and common sense I propose "Pax Galactica" - live and let live, golden rule and Prime Directive.....you get the idea.
It is likely that other civilizations have reached the same conclusion if they know their biology well and are enlighten enough to see further from their noses and realize that a conqueror style civilization even if it manages to crush all opponents (very unlikely) eventually fills all space and turns against itself.
Wish I had mod points today. Sooner or later though we will meet civilization that will crush our conquest when we try to crush them. Isn't it better to simply live in peace? The Universe is big enough for all, I guess. Think about it - if everyone out there was a conqueror, chances are someone would have taken our planet already, say a 100 million years ago. But they didn't (or couldn't but we are not looking at this possibility here - we assume interstellar travel is reasonably possible). Would we have moral issue to colonize a planet teaming with primitive lizards? Of course not (well, the vast majority of us, anyway). Oh, wait, after 100 million years and at least one huge asteroid there are apes on that planet and look, one branch is evolving technological civilization! Who would have thought....
I think there is a lot to be said about the Prime Directive...
If memory serves, "Guns , germs and steel" discusses at length the reasons for the large differences in technological advancement between countries/races. Surely Diamond is not perfect but what I read there made quite a bit of sense. Had nothing to do with genetics and much more with geography and a few key technologies. The part dedicated to the extermination of the Maya and Aztec civilizations was very insightful...
The previous guy at least got credit (greatly exaggerated, IMO) for rocking the communist boat. This man was....nothing. No charisma, no creativity, no original thinking. Boring, so middle-ages attitude. Every time I read he had visited some state or another the speeches were always summarized as "Pope warns against aggressive secularism" , "Pope warns against diminished believe in god". Stop whining, man, and face the music! You and your organization are a major cause for the people's diminished believe. How can I trust these people, not only because of the kiddie molesting but for all those people have done to the world....He even affronted Elizabeth of Windsor; she replayed in a polite version of "piss off" - "The constitution of UK grants religious freedom including not having a religion".
He is a PR disaster; look no further for the cause of the resignation...
Sorry to report that it does not even show on my phone - I get white screen. HTC Desire. Could be that my Android version is too old (2.2) or something. Not my fault - I don't get OS updates from HTC. I hope it gets fixed.
It's the trauma, man! When I was in France for a few months as a guest researcher, I started learning the language and made good progress.
And then I was invited to a Star Wars marathon, only I did not know that the movie would be dubbed in French. The horror never left me and kind of ruined my desire to speak French. Have you ever heard Darth Vader speaking French?
People told me the French speak no English. Not true - one of them for instance, after asking where I come from and hearing the answer, immediately said "Fuck you". So I said, "my English teacher told me that in this case I say Fuck you too". The little @#$% was still soar (4 years later) that my country denied the French participation in the 1994 World football cup (in the US) by beating them in France in the last qualification game in the last seconds of the game [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpwNv29XbbQ].
Then we went to US, reached the semi-final (lost it from Italy), beating Argentina, Mexico and Germany along the way. So I say we deserved to be there. The French, meanwhile, having suffered such humiliation, reformed their system, attracted some really good players and won the next World cup (which was just happening while I was there). So I say they should have thanked my country for making the wake-up call rather than curse us.
Wonderful country, France! Has one problem only - it's full with Frenchman:)
Do you think it is possible to make both games more interesting by making them (much) more complicated and even more closer to reality? Let me think how to say it properly....imagine that you seriously built city planner simulation for real life cities. Now, this would probably be quite complicated, so take the light approach, the popular version so to speak, but still include as much reality as possible. Like Alpha C. but to the power of Alpha C. Go really hardcore on the "simulation" thingy.
No idea how complicated or expensive this might be. I guess you can "stretch it" almost indefinitely, until one day it is a tool for "psychohistory" calculations;). What was the name of that device, anyway.? I have the books only in my native language; haven't read them in English and can't even remember how it was called in my language.
Maybe money would not be the biggest problem since the budgets of some recent games were worthy of Hollywood. On the other hand, would it sell so well to cover big investment? If every nerd promises to buy one, maybe they'd try:)
That's weird! I played without much trouble Alpha C. on a slow processor (compared to 550MHz P3). No kidding. I am from poor country and at that time I could afford only slow PCs. No idea if it had anything to do with the fact it was a pirated game (how could we afford to buy the software if we hardly had the money for crappy hardware?).
The games I remember never being able to play properly because could never upgrade that fast were the Elder's scrolls. From Arena, which I tried on my first PC (386 40MHz, 4MB RAM) all the way to...wait a second, until today! Well, those guys are consistent. That is why I play now Oblivion and even Morrowind.
BTW, I got Alpha C. from GOG few months ago and they added the expansion recently, for free. What a game, I have forgotten how delicious it was! Now, I could read the manual, for instance, and was very pleased to see little touches, like that parts of it resembled popular scientific article that explained what happens on this new world (geology, ecology, etc.). Great stuff....they don't make them like that anymore.
The space mining buzzing is increasing lately. "Everyone on Earth would be a billionaire if we use the resources in the asteroid belt" claims R. Branson.
Well Richard, are you going to tell me that if we assimilate the resources the result won't be a handful of gazzilionares that will order planets at Magratea and the rest of us would slave it "Blade runner style". You wanna tell me that magically, incredibly our socioeconomic system will disappear overnight? Provided that by definition the people who can change the system are the greatest benefactors of it, so why will they want to change it?
A billion dollars will be pocket change? How much of it will "trickle down" to my "middle class, ever decreasing buying power because of financial frauds by greedy people" pocket, Richard? It does not matter at all how much resources we can lay our hands on. We will grow, expand, waste them even more recklessly as we do now and eventually finish them off....while all the evils of the socioeconomic system will be with us all the time. Don't fool yourself Richard. Don't try to fool me too!!
But you know, Richard, actually your lie is the way to go from purely egoistic, survival point of view. If we want to make it to the Star Trek era [in one piece] we have to change and I don't mean Obama's change here. I mean paradigm change. I mean the simplest idea of all time - limited growth in an practically infinite Universe. Everyone has their human needs fulfilled. That's just the starting point.
All the above is why I stopped being excited about technology news whatsoever. We made an engine that uses half the fuel? Well, we will just buy twice as many engines because they will be cheaper and besides the whole fraking world including politics, business and religion (but not art and science mind you) constantly, relentlessly screams "more people, more money, only infinite growth is possible, if we stop wasting ever more the economy will collapse, the world would burn and we will be back to the caves, we need more growth, more children or our pensions will be gone, we need more believers in the true faith, we need more, more, more, more, more.....).
Our civilization has no redundancy, no back-up, no long-term planning at all. It is the sloppiest piece of engineering of all time.....no decent geek would ever dream of putting his/her signature on such a piece of crap! And we all live by it, die by it, are run by it! It's horrifying that we first waste the most accessible and the least replaceable resources. That is the way of our system; nothing in it that contradicts this behavior survives. We are re-active not pro-active. Our leaders never lead, they follow, adapt and mimicry.
I will finish this rant by respectfully altering the last sentence from Richard Feinman's "addendum" to the NASA report about the Challenger disaster:
"For a successful civilization reality must take precedence over politics, business and religion *, for Nature cannot be fooled"
* politics, business and religion all operate without any regard of reality [they are all ideologies] and are therefore in the form they are, highly dangerous for the
P.S> I could not post first time for some reason. If the post still appears double, I apologize
The space mining buzzing is increasing lately. "Everyone on Earth would be a billionaire if we use the resources in the asteroid belt" claims R. Branson.
Well Richard, are you going to tell me that if we assimilate the resources the result won't be a handful of gazzilionares that will order planets at Magratea and the rest of us would slave it "Blade runner style". You wanna tell me that magically, incredibly our socioeconomic system will disappear overnight? Provided that by definition the people who can change the system are the greatest benefactors of it, so why will they want to change it?
A billion dollars will be pocket change? How much of it will "trickle down" to my "middle class, ever decreasing buying power because of financial frauds by greedy people" pocket, Richard? It does not matter at all how much resources we can lay our hands on. We will grow, expand, waste them even more recklessly as we do now and eventually finish them off....while all the evils of the socioeconomic system will be with us all the time. Don't fool yourself Richard. Don't try to fool me too!!
But you know, Richard, actually your lie is the way to go from purely egoistic, survival point of view. If we want to make it to the Star Trek era [in one piece] we have to change and I don't mean Obama's change here. I mean paradigm change. I mean the simplest idea of all time - limited growth in an practically infinite Universe. Everyone has their human needs fulfilled. That's just the starting point.
All the above is why I stopped being excited about technology news whatsoever. We made an engine that uses half the fuel? Well, we will just buy twice as many engines because they will be cheaper and besides the whole fraking world including politics, business and religion (but not art and science mind you) constantly, relentlessly screams "more people, more money, only infinite growth is possible, if we stop wasting ever more the economy will collapse, the world would burn and we will be back to the caves, we need more growth, more children or our pensions will be gone, we need more believers in the true faith, we need more, more, more, more, more.....).
Our civilization has no redundancy, no back-up, no long-term planning at all. It is the sloppiest piece of engineering of all time.....no decent geek would ever dream of putting his/her signature on such a piece of crap! And we all live by it, die by it, are run by it! It's horrifying that we first waste the most accessible and the least replaceable resources. That is the way of our system; nothing in it that contradicts this behavior survives. We are re-active not pro-active. Our leaders never lead, they follow, adapt and mimicry.
I will finish this rant by respectfully altering the last sentence from Richard Feinman's "addendum" to the NASA report about the Challenger disaster:
"For a successful civilization reality must take precedence over politics, business and religion *, for Nature cannot be fooled"
* politics, business and religion all operate without any regard of reality [they are all ideologies] and are therefore in the form they are, highly dangerous for the survival of Homo Sapiens
Slashdot Mirror
So now we know why "Belgium" is a swear word throughout the Galaxy....
What is the "other" section consists off? Jedi, FSM, est..?
Then they are not religious in the traditional sense and suddenly "atheism in respect to any major religion" climbs to number two after the Christians. Moreover I have never seen an unbiased statistics about the only country I can speak off with authority – my own. According to the CIA fact book everyone in my country who belongs to the majority ethnic group (white Caucasian) is Orthodox Christian. Well, at least from my generation more than half are atheists and among everyone else not everyone is Christian. I think the greatest public secret of religion is that one, it loses ground unless extreme peer pressure and violence is used and two, many of those that belong to a particular church follow because of tradition, fashion or conformism, not so much from actual belief. And anyway, can you say that you have a true believer unless he/she is prepared to give his/her life and the lives of anyone (if deemed necessary) for your God? How many such people are out there? What was the saying? If God tells you to kill your kids and you don't, you are an atheist. If you do, you are a madman that should be locked away.
"I've been mad for fucking years, absolutely years, been over the edge for yonks, been working me buns off for bands..."
"I've always been mad, I know I've been mad, like the
most of us...very hard to explain why you're mad, even if you're not mad..."
Who says we ever lived in one?
The only time I saw porn on the tubes is when I went looking for it! And as every modern citizen I use the net daily...porn is not "in your face"!
Now, regarding the fact that every product in this world seems to be promoted by half-naked women - on this I agree with the legislation - it is in my face and I won't miss it if it's gone. The same for the models advertizing clothes that have less meat on them than prisoners in concentration camp...ugh, that is ugly and in my face daily!
Conclusion - the porn business is the least "in your face" compared to almost every other business when it comes to throwing naked flesh on billboards, newspapers, magazines and the internet.
And neither you or the once above mentioned that Carry is manic depressive. She was one of the stars in Stephen Fry's documentary aboout manic depressives. Perhaps the drugs and the drinks are consequience? She is at the moment on tons of medication and barely behaves normally. I am so sorry that he life turned that way...
*idly wonders how many people reading this actually will get either of our references*
Judging by the moderation of my post - none so far
It's mainly because people were so convinced by the cold war 'nuclear terror' campaigns run by the west (and probably the other side also) that they cannot see past that.
No, the other side did not run a scare campaign against nuclear power. On the contrary - the "peaceful atom" was hailed as one of the key technologies to achieve the Communist ideal, which in its purest form means the basic necessities of life are granted by birthright to everyone. In fact the sci-fi dream of many. I do not know a single person from my generation and my country that is afraid of nuclear energy.
Borehole?! Are you up for worm-rape?
Guess if your (very insightful) comment will make it to the news, so to speak? Whereas the comment you reply to will be on every first page in ...hm..the first world. In fact they can, and will do better - "TPB supporting N Korea's nuclear weapons program".
I, for one, want to see this happen just so that the front page of the TPB will read - "DMCA this".
I think I posted this once here for a different discussion. Imagine two villages - A and B. The people from A for whatever reason - genetics or behavior (or both) are afraid of wolves/dogs more than the people from village B. Village B over time domesticates few wolves and village A does not. Village B now has evolutionary advantage. fast forward - over time, people who cannot be "domesticated" by the wolves disappear just as wolves that cannot be domesticated by humans disappear.
The process goes two ways. Usually we ascribe the "intention" to the human side only, because of the wide-spread fallacy that you need "intention" for the evolutionary process to happen...
More like Vogonium...
Alas, you are so right. Some documents came to light after the fall of the wall in my motherland and I was stupid enough to read them. Lost my sleep for quite a while..
Well, I was involved in decision making at work about the effect of temperature on work performance. What I learned during the research phase was that way before global warming was an issue people have been studying the subject vigorously. After all, many a legislation is in effect that regulates those things in any decent country. The first google hit in English [http://www.iaqscience.lbl.gov/performance-temp-office.html] shows that 10% decrease is easily achievable over 5 deg Fahrenheit from the optimal value. At work we really had an issue with this and the negative effects on performance were visible to all of us.
The other thing is that we talk about change of temperature. Change. There is a rate of this change and a rate at which our bodies can adapt. I am from a continental, -20 to +40 Celsius country and I live and work for a long time now in the Netherlands. So at work I was not disturbed much by the high temperature. Other colleagues from warm countries were likewise almost unaffected. The Dutch were affected much more strongly. On the other hand they withstand the lack of sunshine, especially in winter, much lither than me and the other southerners. Work and population in NL is the densest along the coast. High temperature here combined with high humidity makes live hell (ain't New York like this too?). I will take 40 deg back home against 35 in Amsterdam any day.
Put aside the debate about the origin and the rate of global warming. Is higher global temperature going to decrease work performance? - yes. Equally around the globe (assuming the same average temperature increase)? - no. Can we expect local extremities due to specific response of the local weather to the hotter climate? - yes (see humidity example above). Are we going to be able to adapt (physiologically-wise and fast enough) to the change? - probably not. Judging by the trouble the rest of the ecosystem has adapting to the already observed increase of temperature we (sans technology) would find it very difficult too. So we will have to spend even more energy for cooling and drying at work and home? - yes.
Without taking any side in the pro-anti flue vaccine debate, my anecdotal evidence is that every 3 years on average I get the flu in September. There follows a week of pain and misery and then nothing for another few years. During the winter months when all coworkers go down like flies I have some sniffles and bit of cold sweating and that is all even if they cough up in my face.
So it seems to me that the body is very capable of upgrading its immune system and it lasts for more than a year. Of course the problem is that I am barely 40. Not sure how easy the "upgrades" will be say after 20 years. I can imagine that a weak body might not survive it. However, most elderly people in my country get no flu vaccines because they are too poor. I have never heard of anyone dying of flu yet in the village where my relatives live and with a population of a few thousand (mostly elderly people) nothing remains a secret so I'd know (well, my mom would know and tell me).
Another funfact is that most of my coworkers do get the shots 'cause they got kids and they still cannot avoid it. Especially the one that upgrades me - I get it always in September because I spend all my vacation every year going to the same place (the poor village I mentioned above) at the same time. And then on the way back, like clockwork every few years, I start getting bad during the flight and because I always fly on Friday I am down during the weekend and most of the following week. However once I went to work on the Monday and transmitted the thing to my coworkers. Hell broke loose! We have an agreement with my boss now should I get again the "east European flu" I simply stay the whole week at home.
Thus, I will not get any shots myself for the foreseeable future as I definitely do not need them. But it seems the issue is rather complicated and the present day mobility of people only increases the risk.
Of course, if we can, we should back-up our species to at least a few more planets. But we should not, IMO, aim to occupy ALL the living space denying it to other civilizations, present and future. Based on science and common sense I propose "Pax Galactica" - live and let live, golden rule and Prime Directive.....you get the idea.
It is likely that other civilizations have reached the same conclusion if they know their biology well and are enlighten enough to see further from their noses and realize that a conqueror style civilization even if it manages to crush all opponents (very unlikely) eventually fills all space and turns against itself.
This.
Wish I had mod points today. Sooner or later though we will meet civilization that will crush our conquest when we try to crush them. Isn't it better to simply live in peace? The Universe is big enough for all, I guess. Think about it - if everyone out there was a conqueror, chances are someone would have taken our planet already, say a 100 million years ago. But they didn't (or couldn't but we are not looking at this possibility here - we assume interstellar travel is reasonably possible). Would we have moral issue to colonize a planet teaming with primitive lizards? Of course not (well, the vast majority of us, anyway). Oh, wait, after 100 million years and at least one huge asteroid there are apes on that planet and look, one branch is evolving technological civilization! Who would have thought....
I think there is a lot to be said about the Prime Directive...
If memory serves, "Guns , germs and steel" discusses at length the reasons for the large differences in technological advancement between countries/races. Surely Diamond is not perfect but what I read there made quite a bit of sense. Had nothing to do with genetics and much more with geography and a few key technologies. The part dedicated to the extermination of the Maya and Aztec civilizations was very insightful...
The previous guy at least got credit (greatly exaggerated, IMO) for rocking the communist boat. This man was....nothing. No charisma, no creativity, no original thinking. Boring, so middle-ages attitude. Every time I read he had visited some state or another the speeches were always summarized as "Pope warns against aggressive secularism" , "Pope warns against diminished believe in god". Stop whining, man, and face the music! You and your organization are a major cause for the people's diminished believe. How can I trust these people, not only because of the kiddie molesting but for all those people have done to the world....He even affronted Elizabeth of Windsor; she replayed in a polite version of "piss off" - "The constitution of UK grants religious freedom including not having a religion".
He is a PR disaster; look no further for the cause of the resignation...
Sorry to report that it does not even show on my phone - I get white screen. HTC Desire. Could be that my Android version is too old (2.2) or something. Not my fault - I don't get OS updates from HTC. I hope it gets fixed.
It's the trauma, man! When I was in France for a few months as a guest researcher, I started learning the language and made good progress.
And then I was invited to a Star Wars marathon, only I did not know that the movie would be dubbed in French. The horror never left me and kind of ruined my desire to speak French. Have you ever heard Darth Vader speaking French?
People told me the French speak no English. Not true - one of them for instance, after asking where I come from and hearing the answer, immediately said "Fuck you". So I said, "my English teacher told me that in this case I say Fuck you too". The little @#$% was still soar (4 years later) that my country denied the French participation in the 1994 World football cup (in the US) by beating them in France in the last qualification game in the last seconds of the game [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpwNv29XbbQ].
Then we went to US, reached the semi-final (lost it from Italy), beating Argentina, Mexico and Germany along the way. So I say we deserved to be there. The French, meanwhile, having suffered such humiliation, reformed their system, attracted some really good players and won the next World cup (which was just happening while I was there). So I say they should have thanked my country for making the wake-up call rather than curse us.
Wonderful country, France! Has one problem only - it's full with Frenchman:)
Do you think it is possible to make both games more interesting by making them (much) more complicated and even more closer to reality? Let me think how to say it properly....imagine that you seriously built city planner simulation for real life cities. Now, this would probably be quite complicated, so take the light approach, the popular version so to speak, but still include as much reality as possible. Like Alpha C. but to the power of Alpha C. Go really hardcore on the "simulation" thingy.
No idea how complicated or expensive this might be. I guess you can "stretch it" almost indefinitely, until one day it is a tool for "psychohistory" calculations ;). What was the name of that device, anyway.? I have the books only in my native language; haven't read them in English and can't even remember how it was called in my language.
Maybe money would not be the biggest problem since the budgets of some recent games were worthy of Hollywood. On the other hand, would it sell so well to cover big investment? If every nerd promises to buy one, maybe they'd try:)
That's weird! I played without much trouble Alpha C. on a slow processor (compared to 550MHz P3). No kidding. I am from poor country and at that time I could afford only slow PCs. No idea if it had anything to do with the fact it was a pirated game (how could we afford to buy the software if we hardly had the money for crappy hardware?).
The games I remember never being able to play properly because could never upgrade that fast were the Elder's scrolls. From Arena, which I tried on my first PC (386 40MHz, 4MB RAM) all the way to...wait a second, until today! Well, those guys are consistent. That is why I play now Oblivion and even Morrowind.
BTW, I got Alpha C. from GOG few months ago and they added the expansion recently, for free. What a game, I have forgotten how delicious it was! Now, I could read the manual, for instance, and was very pleased to see little touches, like that parts of it resembled popular scientific article that explained what happens on this new world (geology, ecology, etc.). Great stuff....they don't make them like that anymore.
The space mining buzzing is increasing lately. "Everyone on Earth would be a billionaire if we use the resources in the asteroid belt" claims R. Branson.
Well Richard, are you going to tell me that if we assimilate the resources the result won't be a handful of gazzilionares that will order planets at Magratea and the rest of us would slave it "Blade runner style". You wanna tell me that magically, incredibly our socioeconomic system will disappear overnight? Provided that by definition the people who can change the system are the greatest benefactors of it, so why will they want to change it?
A billion dollars will be pocket change? How much of it will "trickle down" to my "middle class, ever decreasing buying power because of financial frauds by greedy people" pocket, Richard? It does not matter at all how much resources we can lay our hands on. We will grow, expand, waste them even more recklessly as we do now and eventually finish them off....while all the evils of the socioeconomic system will be with us all the time. Don't fool yourself Richard. Don't try to fool me too!!
But you know, Richard, actually your lie is the way to go from purely egoistic, survival point of view. If we want to make it to the Star Trek era [in one piece] we have to change and I don't mean Obama's change here. I mean paradigm change. I mean the simplest idea of all time - limited growth in an practically infinite Universe. Everyone has their human needs fulfilled. That's just the starting point.
All the above is why I stopped being excited about technology news whatsoever. We made an engine that uses half the fuel? Well, we will just buy twice as many engines because they will be cheaper and besides the whole fraking world including politics, business and religion (but not art and science mind you) constantly, relentlessly screams "more people, more money, only infinite growth is possible, if we stop wasting ever more the economy will collapse, the world would burn and we will be back to the caves, we need more growth, more children or our pensions will be gone, we need more believers in the true faith, we need more, more, more, more, more.....).
Our civilization has no redundancy, no back-up, no long-term planning at all. It is the sloppiest piece of engineering of all time.....no decent geek would ever dream of putting his/her signature on such a piece of crap! And we all live by it, die by it, are run by it! It's horrifying that we first waste the most accessible and the least replaceable resources. That is the way of our system; nothing in it that contradicts this behavior survives. We are re-active not pro-active. Our leaders never lead, they follow, adapt and mimicry.
I will finish this rant by respectfully altering the last sentence from Richard Feinman's "addendum" to the NASA report about the Challenger disaster:
"For a successful civilization reality must take precedence over politics, business and religion *, for Nature cannot be fooled"
* politics, business and religion all operate without any regard of reality [they are all ideologies] and are therefore in the form they are, highly dangerous for the
P.S> I could not post first time for some reason. If the post still appears double, I apologize
The space mining buzzing is increasing lately. "Everyone on Earth would be a billionaire if we use the resources in the asteroid belt" claims R. Branson.
Well Richard, are you going to tell me that if we assimilate the resources the result won't be a handful of gazzilionares that will order planets at Magratea and the rest of us would slave it "Blade runner style". You wanna tell me that magically, incredibly our socioeconomic system will disappear overnight? Provided that by definition the people who can change the system are the greatest benefactors of it, so why will they want to change it?
A billion dollars will be pocket change? How much of it will "trickle down" to my "middle class, ever decreasing buying power because of financial frauds by greedy people" pocket, Richard? It does not matter at all how much resources we can lay our hands on. We will grow, expand, waste them even more recklessly as we do now and eventually finish them off....while all the evils of the socioeconomic system will be with us all the time. Don't fool yourself Richard. Don't try to fool me too!!
But you know, Richard, actually your lie is the way to go from purely egoistic, survival point of view. If we want to make it to the Star Trek era [in one piece] we have to change and I don't mean Obama's change here. I mean paradigm change. I mean the simplest idea of all time - limited growth in an practically infinite Universe. Everyone has their human needs fulfilled. That's just the starting point.
All the above is why I stopped being excited about technology news whatsoever. We made an engine that uses half the fuel? Well, we will just buy twice as many engines because they will be cheaper and besides the whole fraking world including politics, business and religion (but not art and science mind you) constantly, relentlessly screams "more people, more money, only infinite growth is possible, if we stop wasting ever more the economy will collapse, the world would burn and we will be back to the caves, we need more growth, more children or our pensions will be gone, we need more believers in the true faith, we need more, more, more, more, more.....).
Our civilization has no redundancy, no back-up, no long-term planning at all. It is the sloppiest piece of engineering of all time.....no decent geek would ever dream of putting his/her signature on such a piece of crap! And we all live by it, die by it, are run by it! It's horrifying that we first waste the most accessible and the least replaceable resources. That is the way of our system; nothing in it that contradicts this behavior survives. We are re-active not pro-active. Our leaders never lead, they follow, adapt and mimicry.
I will finish this rant by respectfully altering the last sentence from Richard Feinman's "addendum" to the NASA report about the Challenger disaster:
"For a successful civilization reality must take precedence over politics, business and religion *, for Nature cannot be fooled"
* politics, business and religion all operate without any regard of reality [they are all ideologies] and are therefore in the form they are, highly dangerous for the survival of Homo Sapiens