Some of that is true, but there's still plenty of argument that the technology and design of SL is very limiting. With very little previous 3D creation, or scripting experience, it was only a matter of months until I was often feeling limited by what SL was capable of. Some of the limitations were inherent in the design (The scripting language is missing some basic features that would make a lot of sense), and many of the limitations had to do with performance issues. Lag is horrendous, the fps on the client regularly dropping to low single digits, even with the 8 year old visual look, and a decent sized group of people could easily start crashing sims.
People haven't accepted self-destructing DVD's because there's an alternative that's much more attractive. Non-self-destructing DVD's.
The cool thing about a relatively free market is that if there's a better alternative out there, then someone's likely to start selling it. As technology makes design, production, and distribution easier, it becomes harder and harder for competitors to differentiate their products from their rivals. Encasing your product in restrictions basically opens up a big window for someone else to stand up and yell "look how much better my version is! buy mine instead!"
There's an argument to be made in cases of overwhelming monopolies, but anything set up in that way is bound to be short-term, because there's a whole world of potential competitors, and it has become too easy for consumers to shop from that whole world.
What you're describing won't happen to the degree your imagining, just because of the way the market works. Consumers, whether in a video game or real life, may spend a lot of money on stupid stuff, but there is a limit to how far you can push a person, and how much you can rip them off. The DVD's that self-destruct haven't really caught on, and they aren't likely to, because it's obvious to everyone how much they suck. If there's a good market for more open stuff, then someone will provide.
There's no real freedom of speech argument to be made here, because no one has stopped these guys from making the game, no law was passed to restrict or bury it, and no one has been arrested for being involved. The developers have been able to make their statement, and another group of individuals has decided that they don't want to help the developers spread that statement. Your freedom of speech does not require that I, or anyone else, or even the government help you spread your message. Only that the government cannot stop you from expressing that message yourself (with a few sensible exceptions).
It always seemed sensible to me to assume that they just sort of added "High Speed" to that to make the acronym cooler. I would imagine that while some missiles surely move faster than others, they all tend to move at what someone would consider to be a high speed.
So would these guys propose that FedEx start a new company for every 100 of their delivery drivers? How about their warehouse workers? What about the mechanics who help maintain their vehicles? They'd have hundreds of companies, the logistics of all of that would be insane. Coordinating all of them together?
I haven't read anything about their philosophy other than what you just shared, but it's hard to take seriously any sort of one-size-fits-all solution for something as broad as "all companies."
I honestly think that Wii sales could really snowball in the future. We took the Wii with us when we travelled to visit the family over christmas, and a lot of the people who tried it were asking questions about where they could get one. My mom played Wii Tennis for about 15 minutes the night we got in town, and the next morning while we were still sleeping, she went to the mall to try to buy herself one.
It's really been almost "infectious" for people we've let try it. The more people who buy it, the more that other people will be exposed to it. This obviously will hit a limit somewhere down the line, but the immediate accessibility of the controls and that new coolness factor really could push that limit a lot further than many people expect.
Really, the biggest advantage that the Xbox had was availability and the fact that it was the holidays. It's a solid system, but at launch, any competitive console is going to sell out as fast as they can be made. Add in the christmas rush, and I don't doubt that both Nintendo and Sony could've easily moved more units than the Xbox360 were more systems available at launch. Either way, there were millions of people out there looking for consoles, and while they may have had preferences towards one or the other, at the end of the day something to distract your kids is better than nothing, and at a lot of stores your choices were the 360 or nothing.
That being said, if it had turned out that way, MS shouldn't have felt any shame at being bested. First to market advantage disappears while a new console launches. I guess the true test there is whether or not the Xbox360's first to market advantage re-establishes itself in the future. When the hype and newness of the Wii and the PS3 had died down, and the consoles are competing on their games alone, that's when we find out who's got the more successful system.
If there were such thing as comma jail, I would likely be sent there for a while.
Just like many people successfully predicted the death of Nintendo after the N64 and the gamecube had disappointing sales? Oh wait, that didn't happen. Instead, Nintendo realized that the arrogance that they had developed during their heyday did not guarantee them future success, so they were forced to do some extra thinking, and have come up with the DS and the Wii as a response.
Even if the PS3 comes in last, don't expect Sony to throw in the towel in regards to gaming. Just as a drop in marketshare hasn't ruined Nintendo's brand, the playstation brand is still important, and Sony is likey to take another stab at it when the next next-gen rolls around. We can only hope that if the PS3 falls below Sony's expectations that they learn some lessons from it, and make a more desirable system the next time around.
Saying that food is "converted" to energy is sort of correct, but it's more like food is converted into waste material, and energy is taken from the process. The energy is a result of chemical changes that the body puts the food through, the matter making up the food is not turned directly into energy. That would basically involve fusion and/or fission, and that would likely lead to some very upset stomachs.
Of course, in the Star Trek universe, converting between matter and energy is pretty easy with their technology. I don't know any specifics as to how that transfer is supposed to work, but it appears that once you've got enough energy, you can make just about any kind of matter that you want from it. So it wouldn't matter what you were de-replicating, you could take the energy from it, and replicate that back into normal food. Really it'd be using technology to internalize and speed up the nutrient cycle. We already know how to turn human waste back into food, we just require bacteria and plants to do it, and it takes a while.
One of the hardest parts would be dealing with the occasional byproducts that can't be reused, but I would think that it'd be possible to clean out ones body, and then ingest some engineered nutrients designed to not have any unusable and recyclable material. You'd likely also need other supplements to deal with ways that your body loses mass that doesn't involve your digestive system (skin flaking off, sweating, sneezing, etc.)
Yes, the world of civil engineering has seen a lot of progress in the past few decades. Not only have most cities quietly replaced all their utility lines with magnetically isolated counterparts, but they've begun trials of new "wireless", or should I say "pipeless" sewer lines, capable of transmitting waste without the need to run lines underground. While these PASN's (Pipeless Area Sewer Networks) will be of great use to engineers and architects, I'm personally more excited about the potential for consumer level, personal "pipeless" systems. Being able to remove wastes from my body without having to utilize my built-in plumbing will better fit my lifestyle, and I'll have to wash my hands a whole lot less.
You missed the last paragraph, obviously. This new DNA will be created out of anti-matter, creating what is essentially anti-DNA. This anti-DNA will annihilate on contact with normal DNA, and release incredible amounts of energy.
The DOD's goal is to eventually breed entire anti-DNA animals. Imagine an anti-rat, which could infiltrate an enemy building through the sewer lines or hide in a packaging crate or whatever. Once it's entered the compound it would emerge from hiding, and natural instincts would drive it to attempt mating with other rats. Since it's likely that most of the rats it may find will be of the normal, non-anti-matter variety, the commencing of the mating process will result in mutual annihilation of both rats, and the release of ridiculous amounts of energy. So a hugemongous explosion.
Of course, by breaking this story, slashdot has probably saved millions of lives. Had the pentagon kept this secret as they had hoped, they'd be able to hide their attacks right in public view. Imagine the generous donation by a US "Charity" of a full grown elephant to the Beijing zoo. Little would the chinese government expect that this is actually an anti-elephant, and when it interacted with the normal elephants they already had...let's just say that China wouldn't be challenging the US economy any time soon.
Unfortunately for Sony, the homebrew market is not big enough to support a console. In the grand scheme of things, there aren't enough people interested in it, and the very nature of homebrew means that its enthusiasts are going to be buying less PSP games, and games are where the real money is made.
There's nothing wrong with the PC, do-it-yourself mentality, but it's not why most people buy consoles.
While the basics of flight are generally the same across most planes, a small cessna is going to handle way differently than a 747, which handles much more differently than a F-15.
The really great thing about simulators is that you can easily practice what to do when things go really wrong, without risking an actual aircraft and endangering people.
There's a difference between wanting to look stylish and wanting to look clean.
I don't care if someone bought their clothes at Banana Republic or Walmart, but all other things being equal, I'd rather talk to a guy who bothers to wash his clothes.
Not to mention that if you just spent $300+ on a nice little gadget, why wouldn't you want it to look nice and new for as long as possible.
Well, I guess there's certainly a judgement call to be made, but I was trying to draw a distinction between a normal application, and what I would consider a "utility".
Basically, running an application is sort of the end purpose for a computer. While utilities exist to make a computer more capable of running applications, or running them more efficiently. In that sense, an OS is really just an important utility. A computer with just only an OS and a bunch of utilities installed is not particularly useful for most people.
That's not an airtight definition, and as you alluded to, not everyone has enough knowledge to make that sort of distinction. But as for a bunch of techies discussing bundling software and its effects on competition, it's not a useless line of thought.
While undoubtedly some people would cry foul at the examples given in the grandparent post, I think most people(who have enough computer knowledge to know what disk image or network sniffing software is) can tell the difference between a piece of software bundled into an OS to edge out competitors, verses a utility that provides useful and direct access to basic computer functions.
I don't think the average./ reader, or the average consumer would be too accepting of this sort of thing, regardless of who did it. Think for a second about what is going on here. An advertising firm is trying to pass off their ads as completely neutral, unsolicited praise for a product.
Everyone knows that advertisements stretch the truth a little, but we accept it because we know they're ads, we know they were created with a profit-driven agenda, and so we can compensate. We compensate by researching products, trying to find opinions and information from consumers; people who have bought, tried, used, and abused the product. There is a lot of demand for unfiltered assessments of products, because we all know that the company produced ads are bunk. What Sony is doing here is muddying that process.
Am I surprised that advertising has moved on to this? No, not really. I am surprised that a company as big as Sony feels the need to do it (and that they did it so poorly). But surprised or not, I definitely don't have to like it or approve of it. I, from time to time, worship at the altar of Apple. But if they were to do something like this, I would not be impressed, and I don't think/. would either.
Viral marketing isn't inherently bad. A good example was the 'i love bees' dealie that bungie did a while back. It was mysterious, and resulted in a lot of publicity, but it wasn't so blatantly dishonest. It was trying to create buzz, and not trying to pass off paid advertising as legitimate opinions. That was a genius marketing campaign.
I think they're looking at it at a very superficial, impulse level. If I'm wandering through the mall, and all of a sudden decide I want an electronic toothbrush, I might take the one that has more feature bullet-points on the box, especially if price is pretty much the same.
But like you said, the user experience after the sale might not go so well if this toothbrush is too complicated (or worse, the money spent adding all those features is money that wasn't available to make the product high quality and/or durable). Then all of a sudden I have a negative opinion of that brand, and word of mouth advertising won't be friendly towards it.
Now, I don't think that the electronic toothbrush market is driven by hype as much as say, mp3 players, but the internet makes it really easy for people to find reviews written by normal people, so word-of-mouth is an issue worth being concerned about.
It's important to not confuse functionality with complexity. While it's true that adding more features tends to make something more complicated, it's usually the features that appeal to people, more than the mess they have to negotiate to get to those features. Ideally you add more functionality while still maintaining simplicity. But it's certainly possible to offer features that have such value to a person that they'll endure a complex process to get it done.
A well made consumer product will often follow one of two paths: Either it will have a laser like focus on a limited feature set, and make them very simple; or it will have designed into it a gradual learning curve to access the complexity.
All other things being equal, I have a hard time believing that a more complicated option would win over a simpler one in the mass market. Most people don't prefer things to be harder than they need to be.
That's exactly it. Apple definitely sets the bar in regards to style and computers. MS is just making a serious effort to catch up with OSX in terms of visuals, is anyone surprised that Steve Jobs is going to move the bar again?
And although Apple has moved on from the "Think Different" campaign, they still want to be easily distinguishable from Windows. I expect that this next update will have some significant functional UI changes, but even if they didn't have any of those ready to go, it'd probably benefit them just to change the visual look of OS X, in order to differentiate it from everything else.
Agreed. I've already pretty much given up on email ever getting cleaned up. I have come to accept the fact that email will always suck because of spam.
But comment spam and the like annoys me even more, because it's happening on sites that I like to read, but often can't control (meaning I can't remove the spam). At least with my email then I can delete the crap, or customize my filters to give myself at least a tiny bit of control.
Even on my piddly little blog with maybe 5 or 6 regular readers, the comment spam was a pretty constant hassle, and having to deal with it was one of the big reasons why I basically stopped using the blog. No great loss to the world, as my blog wasn't anything special, but it's kind of sad that some anonymous assholes with computer scripts can stop me from doing something that I enjoyed, without even specifically targeting me. Stupid internet.
He got it right in that anti-matter is a very space/weight efficient way to store energy. Of course, there are some technical details that he likely did not get right, and which we aren't quite sure how to efficiently solve yet. Like how do we produce big quantities of the stuff, how do we safely store big quantities of the stuff, how do we best turn that antimatter into useful propulsion, and how do we do all of that in a space craft that is feasible to build and safe for humans to travel in.
Now, even figuring all of that out doesn't necessarily mean that our spaceships will actually travel faster than light. But either way, if all that can get figured out, then we can worry about providing food and water for the astronauts during the trip.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of that is true, but there's still plenty of argument that the technology and design of SL is very limiting. With very little previous 3D creation, or scripting experience, it was only a matter of months until I was often feeling limited by what SL was capable of. Some of the limitations were inherent in the design (The scripting language is missing some basic features that would make a lot of sense), and many of the limitations had to do with performance issues. Lag is horrendous, the fps on the client regularly dropping to low single digits, even with the 8 year old visual look, and a decent sized group of people could easily start crashing sims.
People haven't accepted self-destructing DVD's because there's an alternative that's much more attractive. Non-self-destructing DVD's.
The cool thing about a relatively free market is that if there's a better alternative out there, then someone's likely to start selling it. As technology makes design, production, and distribution easier, it becomes harder and harder for competitors to differentiate their products from their rivals. Encasing your product in restrictions basically opens up a big window for someone else to stand up and yell "look how much better my version is! buy mine instead!"
There's an argument to be made in cases of overwhelming monopolies, but anything set up in that way is bound to be short-term, because there's a whole world of potential competitors, and it has become too easy for consumers to shop from that whole world.
What you're describing won't happen to the degree your imagining, just because of the way the market works. Consumers, whether in a video game or real life, may spend a lot of money on stupid stuff, but there is a limit to how far you can push a person, and how much you can rip them off. The DVD's that self-destruct haven't really caught on, and they aren't likely to, because it's obvious to everyone how much they suck. If there's a good market for more open stuff, then someone will provide.
There's no real freedom of speech argument to be made here, because no one has stopped these guys from making the game, no law was passed to restrict or bury it, and no one has been arrested for being involved. The developers have been able to make their statement, and another group of individuals has decided that they don't want to help the developers spread that statement. Your freedom of speech does not require that I, or anyone else, or even the government help you spread your message. Only that the government cannot stop you from expressing that message yourself (with a few sensible exceptions).
It always seemed sensible to me to assume that they just sort of added "High Speed" to that to make the acronym cooler. I would imagine that while some missiles surely move faster than others, they all tend to move at what someone would consider to be a high speed.
So would these guys propose that FedEx start a new company for every 100 of their delivery drivers? How about their warehouse workers? What about the mechanics who help maintain their vehicles? They'd have hundreds of companies, the logistics of all of that would be insane. Coordinating all of them together?
I haven't read anything about their philosophy other than what you just shared, but it's hard to take seriously any sort of one-size-fits-all solution for something as broad as "all companies."
I honestly think that Wii sales could really snowball in the future. We took the Wii with us when we travelled to visit the family over christmas, and a lot of the people who tried it were asking questions about where they could get one. My mom played Wii Tennis for about 15 minutes the night we got in town, and the next morning while we were still sleeping, she went to the mall to try to buy herself one.
It's really been almost "infectious" for people we've let try it. The more people who buy it, the more that other people will be exposed to it. This obviously will hit a limit somewhere down the line, but the immediate accessibility of the controls and that new coolness factor really could push that limit a lot further than many people expect.
Really, the biggest advantage that the Xbox had was availability and the fact that it was the holidays. It's a solid system, but at launch, any competitive console is going to sell out as fast as they can be made. Add in the christmas rush, and I don't doubt that both Nintendo and Sony could've easily moved more units than the Xbox360 were more systems available at launch. Either way, there were millions of people out there looking for consoles, and while they may have had preferences towards one or the other, at the end of the day something to distract your kids is better than nothing, and at a lot of stores your choices were the 360 or nothing.
That being said, if it had turned out that way, MS shouldn't have felt any shame at being bested. First to market advantage disappears while a new console launches. I guess the true test there is whether or not the Xbox360's first to market advantage re-establishes itself in the future. When the hype and newness of the Wii and the PS3 had died down, and the consoles are competing on their games alone, that's when we find out who's got the more successful system.
If there were such thing as comma jail, I would likely be sent there for a while.
Just like many people successfully predicted the death of Nintendo after the N64 and the gamecube had disappointing sales? Oh wait, that didn't happen. Instead, Nintendo realized that the arrogance that they had developed during their heyday did not guarantee them future success, so they were forced to do some extra thinking, and have come up with the DS and the Wii as a response.
Even if the PS3 comes in last, don't expect Sony to throw in the towel in regards to gaming. Just as a drop in marketshare hasn't ruined Nintendo's brand, the playstation brand is still important, and Sony is likey to take another stab at it when the next next-gen rolls around. We can only hope that if the PS3 falls below Sony's expectations that they learn some lessons from it, and make a more desirable system the next time around.
Saying that food is "converted" to energy is sort of correct, but it's more like food is converted into waste material, and energy is taken from the process. The energy is a result of chemical changes that the body puts the food through, the matter making up the food is not turned directly into energy. That would basically involve fusion and/or fission, and that would likely lead to some very upset stomachs.
Of course, in the Star Trek universe, converting between matter and energy is pretty easy with their technology. I don't know any specifics as to how that transfer is supposed to work, but it appears that once you've got enough energy, you can make just about any kind of matter that you want from it. So it wouldn't matter what you were de-replicating, you could take the energy from it, and replicate that back into normal food. Really it'd be using technology to internalize and speed up the nutrient cycle. We already know how to turn human waste back into food, we just require bacteria and plants to do it, and it takes a while.
One of the hardest parts would be dealing with the occasional byproducts that can't be reused, but I would think that it'd be possible to clean out ones body, and then ingest some engineered nutrients designed to not have any unusable and recyclable material. You'd likely also need other supplements to deal with ways that your body loses mass that doesn't involve your digestive system (skin flaking off, sweating, sneezing, etc.)
Yes, the world of civil engineering has seen a lot of progress in the past few decades. Not only have most cities quietly replaced all their utility lines with magnetically isolated counterparts, but they've begun trials of new "wireless", or should I say "pipeless" sewer lines, capable of transmitting waste without the need to run lines underground. While these PASN's (Pipeless Area Sewer Networks) will be of great use to engineers and architects, I'm personally more excited about the potential for consumer level, personal "pipeless" systems. Being able to remove wastes from my body without having to utilize my built-in plumbing will better fit my lifestyle, and I'll have to wash my hands a whole lot less.
You missed the last paragraph, obviously. This new DNA will be created out of anti-matter, creating what is essentially anti-DNA. This anti-DNA will annihilate on contact with normal DNA, and release incredible amounts of energy.
The DOD's goal is to eventually breed entire anti-DNA animals. Imagine an anti-rat, which could infiltrate an enemy building through the sewer lines or hide in a packaging crate or whatever. Once it's entered the compound it would emerge from hiding, and natural instincts would drive it to attempt mating with other rats. Since it's likely that most of the rats it may find will be of the normal, non-anti-matter variety, the commencing of the mating process will result in mutual annihilation of both rats, and the release of ridiculous amounts of energy. So a hugemongous explosion.
Of course, by breaking this story, slashdot has probably saved millions of lives. Had the pentagon kept this secret as they had hoped, they'd be able to hide their attacks right in public view. Imagine the generous donation by a US "Charity" of a full grown elephant to the Beijing zoo. Little would the chinese government expect that this is actually an anti-elephant, and when it interacted with the normal elephants they already had...let's just say that China wouldn't be challenging the US economy any time soon.
MWAHAAHAHAHAHAH!
Unfortunately for Sony, the homebrew market is not big enough to support a console. In the grand scheme of things, there aren't enough people interested in it, and the very nature of homebrew means that its enthusiasts are going to be buying less PSP games, and games are where the real money is made.
There's nothing wrong with the PC, do-it-yourself mentality, but it's not why most people buy consoles.
While the basics of flight are generally the same across most planes, a small cessna is going to handle way differently than a 747, which handles much more differently than a F-15.
The really great thing about simulators is that you can easily practice what to do when things go really wrong, without risking an actual aircraft and endangering people.
There's a difference between wanting to look stylish and wanting to look clean.
I don't care if someone bought their clothes at Banana Republic or Walmart, but all other things being equal, I'd rather talk to a guy who bothers to wash his clothes.
Not to mention that if you just spent $300+ on a nice little gadget, why wouldn't you want it to look nice and new for as long as possible.
Well, I guess there's certainly a judgement call to be made, but I was trying to draw a distinction between a normal application, and what I would consider a "utility".
Basically, running an application is sort of the end purpose for a computer. While utilities exist to make a computer more capable of running applications, or running them more efficiently. In that sense, an OS is really just an important utility. A computer with just only an OS and a bunch of utilities installed is not particularly useful for most people.
That's not an airtight definition, and as you alluded to, not everyone has enough knowledge to make that sort of distinction. But as for a bunch of techies discussing bundling software and its effects on competition, it's not a useless line of thought.
While undoubtedly some people would cry foul at the examples given in the grandparent post, I think most people(who have enough computer knowledge to know what disk image or network sniffing software is) can tell the difference between a piece of software bundled into an OS to edge out competitors, verses a utility that provides useful and direct access to basic computer functions.
I don't think the average ./ reader, or the average consumer would be too accepting of this sort of thing, regardless of who did it. Think for a second about what is going on here. An advertising firm is trying to pass off their ads as completely neutral, unsolicited praise for a product.
/. would either.
Everyone knows that advertisements stretch the truth a little, but we accept it because we know they're ads, we know they were created with a profit-driven agenda, and so we can compensate. We compensate by researching products, trying to find opinions and information from consumers; people who have bought, tried, used, and abused the product. There is a lot of demand for unfiltered assessments of products, because we all know that the company produced ads are bunk. What Sony is doing here is muddying that process.
Am I surprised that advertising has moved on to this? No, not really. I am surprised that a company as big as Sony feels the need to do it (and that they did it so poorly). But surprised or not, I definitely don't have to like it or approve of it. I, from time to time, worship at the altar of Apple. But if they were to do something like this, I would not be impressed, and I don't think
Viral marketing isn't inherently bad. A good example was the 'i love bees' dealie that bungie did a while back. It was mysterious, and resulted in a lot of publicity, but it wasn't so blatantly dishonest. It was trying to create buzz, and not trying to pass off paid advertising as legitimate opinions. That was a genius marketing campaign.
I think they're looking at it at a very superficial, impulse level. If I'm wandering through the mall, and all of a sudden decide I want an electronic toothbrush, I might take the one that has more feature bullet-points on the box, especially if price is pretty much the same.
But like you said, the user experience after the sale might not go so well if this toothbrush is too complicated (or worse, the money spent adding all those features is money that wasn't available to make the product high quality and/or durable). Then all of a sudden I have a negative opinion of that brand, and word of mouth advertising won't be friendly towards it.
Now, I don't think that the electronic toothbrush market is driven by hype as much as say, mp3 players, but the internet makes it really easy for people to find reviews written by normal people, so word-of-mouth is an issue worth being concerned about.
It's important to not confuse functionality with complexity. While it's true that adding more features tends to make something more complicated, it's usually the features that appeal to people, more than the mess they have to negotiate to get to those features. Ideally you add more functionality while still maintaining simplicity. But it's certainly possible to offer features that have such value to a person that they'll endure a complex process to get it done.
A well made consumer product will often follow one of two paths: Either it will have a laser like focus on a limited feature set, and make them very simple; or it will have designed into it a gradual learning curve to access the complexity.
All other things being equal, I have a hard time believing that a more complicated option would win over a simpler one in the mass market. Most people don't prefer things to be harder than they need to be.
That's exactly it. Apple definitely sets the bar in regards to style and computers. MS is just making a serious effort to catch up with OSX in terms of visuals, is anyone surprised that Steve Jobs is going to move the bar again?
And although Apple has moved on from the "Think Different" campaign, they still want to be easily distinguishable from Windows. I expect that this next update will have some significant functional UI changes, but even if they didn't have any of those ready to go, it'd probably benefit them just to change the visual look of OS X, in order to differentiate it from everything else.
Agreed. I've already pretty much given up on email ever getting cleaned up. I have come to accept the fact that email will always suck because of spam.
But comment spam and the like annoys me even more, because it's happening on sites that I like to read, but often can't control (meaning I can't remove the spam). At least with my email then I can delete the crap, or customize my filters to give myself at least a tiny bit of control.
Even on my piddly little blog with maybe 5 or 6 regular readers, the comment spam was a pretty constant hassle, and having to deal with it was one of the big reasons why I basically stopped using the blog. No great loss to the world, as my blog wasn't anything special, but it's kind of sad that some anonymous assholes with computer scripts can stop me from doing something that I enjoyed, without even specifically targeting me. Stupid internet.
No, we're talking about gene roddenberry in this little tangent.
He got it right in that anti-matter is a very space/weight efficient way to store energy. Of course, there are some technical details that he likely did not get right, and which we aren't quite sure how to efficiently solve yet. Like how do we produce big quantities of the stuff, how do we safely store big quantities of the stuff, how do we best turn that antimatter into useful propulsion, and how do we do all of that in a space craft that is feasible to build and safe for humans to travel in.
Now, even figuring all of that out doesn't necessarily mean that our spaceships will actually travel faster than light. But either way, if all that can get figured out, then we can worry about providing food and water for the astronauts during the trip.
But in the case of a space rock impacting the moon, it's not coming down to earth! Oh GOD! WHAT DO WE DO?!!?!?