Personally, I would much rather contribute to the "great rebuilding" than find some line of work I can do without sitting behind a desk getting fat.
You'd rather work in the computer industry than do something where you'd sit behind a desk and get fat?:-)
-
Re:This could be bad news for manned space travel.
on
Life On Mars: ALH84001
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, wait until the last minute. THAT'S a survival strategy.
You meek folks go right ahead and inherit the Earth; we'll be out among the starts. Maybe we'll preserve a few of you in zoos or something later.
-
Re:This could be bad news for manned space travel.
on
Life On Mars: ALH84001
·
· Score: 1
Ooof. That'd be more effective if I hadn't mispelled "explorations". Mea culpa.
-
Re:This could be bad news for manned space travel.
on
Life On Mars: ALH84001
·
· Score: 2
Pardon me for channelling Joe Straczynski while he's still alive, but if we don't start exploring other worlds with an eye toward eventual colonization, we're doomed. The sun will explode, and all of this, from Plato to Moses to Slashdot to ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US was a waste of time.
Allowing the GUARANTEED destruction of our species (the sun won't last forever) because we might hurt another would be immoral.
Yes, I realize we have hurt people and critters in our explanations. My wife and son are part American Indian. But they're also 100% alive.
It's a bigger problem if they haven't developed yet. If they developed a million years before us, they're probably still around.
I would think a species would be most likely to destroy itself in the first couple of hundred thousand years. After that, it's all gravy.
Well, not gravy per se; more like giant ephemorous energy-gathering constructs ~1 AU across, quietly gathering 99.999_% of the energy of their star(s).
It'll be encrypted all the way out your speaker wires to the speakers.
You don't get it; you still can't prevent copying that way.
The last two inches, it'll be unencrypted electricity heading into a magnet. Tear off the speaker, replace with a stereo mini plug, insert into sound card. Voila, encryption bypassed, $0.50 for materials at Radio Shack.
It's even easier if they make a player so I can use headphones; I don't have to wire the jack.
No. The government wastes most of the money intended for road maintainence. To understand why, go watch a road crew some time, if you can happen to catch them when they're actually there. If there's a cloud in the sky three counties over they won't be, but if they do happen to be, you can see them happily asleep in their bulldozers, assured that a combination of byzantine laws and union agreements will make it a multi-month process to fire them.
Then go watch how long it takes to build an access road inside private property. Those folks work for the customer, not the government, and are subject to not getting paid if they don't do the work.
Meanwhile, small towns are having a problem buying enough gasoline to fuel their ambulances, and people are dying.
I live, apparently, less than 500 feet too far from my CO for DSL service. I'm supposed to pick up and move so I can play Q3? Get real.
No, you're supposed to not play Q3. I assure you, your life will not end if you can't play one particular game.
Meanwhile, those of us who do happen to have broadband will enjoy the games that are targetted at us, and those without can go enjoy the games that are targetted at them.
Which, BTW, are often the same games, in different modes of play.
Same deal as oil companies: can they still make an insane profit if gas sells for $.80 per gallon? ABSOLUTELY.
Taxes on a gallon of gas are $0.405. That leaves less than 40 cents per gallon to account for what they pay for it, and their profit.
If you want to see your gas costs go down, stop bitching at the oil company; start bitching at your state government (which is, on average, adding 22.1 cents per gallon) and at the federal government (which is adding 18.4 cents.)
(All figures are from 1995. Many states have raised their taxes since then. June 2000 average was reported at 43 cents per gallon.)
BTW, the average is of the 50 states; the most populous states, with the exception of Texas, are all on the very high end, so the vast majority of Americans pay considerably more than the average given here.
Oh; and these figures don't include sales tax, which some states, such as Indiana, charge on gasoline.
Figure in the shipping costs (since the Clinton administration outlawed drilling in all the places where the most easily-accessible oil is, such as the ANWR) and you end up with a pretty meager per-gallon profit for the oil companies.
They get rich because they're selling an awful lot of product, not because they make a huge profit on it.
Capitalism isn't failing; our government has just herded us into a corporatist economy.
Capitalism is why you can afford to own a computer and non-metered dialup Internet access. In every county that doesn't have a fundamentally capitalist system, people who earn at your percentage of the income scale (guessing at where you are on the scale here) can't afford that, and can't get it free at their local libraries either because nobody can afford to donate to such institutions.
If I had all the money in the US, I still couldn't get broadband where I live.
So what? Does that mean all progress in game design must come to a screeching halt until the telco gets around to servicing you?
No, it doesn't; you won't be able to play Counter-Strike competitively. So what? Games are a LUXURY; if you were unable to play any new game written in the last 5 years at all, it wouldn't hurt you.
Go outside and play football, or move into civilization. The game designers don't owe you anything, and there are tens of thousands of games that will function perfectly well for you.
Go play Space Empires III. That works over email. Hell, I'll even play with you.
Go play chess. Go play Half-Life single player. Go hold a LAN party. Go download MAME and play Zero Wing.
Get over the whining; you're misdirecting it, it's the telco and the cable company that are screwing you, not Sierra and EA and Activision etc.
There was a time when the complaint was that people didn't support computers that only had capital letters. We ignored them and used lowercase.
There was a time when the complaint was that door games didn't work right with monochrome text. We ignored them and used colors.
Now there are some games that only work right multiplayer if you have broadband. Poor baby, get over it; games are not a necessity, and even if they were, multiplayer isn't.
Get broadband. If it's not available where you are, start bugging the telco and/or cable company. If they won't act, move. Don't expect everybody else to make games that suck just so you can be competitive with a modem.
That would be like expecting them to make the games so that you could still be competitive with a 286 with 4MB of RAM.
If this gets made with Glen Larson's input and without Richard Hatch's (no, not the fat gay one, the fat one who played Apollo), it is going to suck like the original.
If, on the other hand, they INCLUDE Richard Hatch's input, it will be the show it always could have been, and should have been.
If you liked VGA Plants, you should try Space Empires III, or it's recently-commercially-released relative, Space Empires IV. Like VGA planets, it is turn-based, and can use transferred files so you can play with people far and wide. It has a bit more economics, and the ships are restricted by what you choose to research instead of by race, but it does have the minor problem that turns are sequential, not batch, so everyone is at the mercy of a single slow player. The graphics beat the pants off of VGA Planets, though.
SE3 was the yardstick by which I measured WINE performance for a long time, although now it's perfectly playable under it so I need a new yardstick.
A lot of people will not play real-time games because they have high blood pressure and it could endanger their lives. I had that problem until the right drugs were identified.
Perhaps they should file lawsuits under the Americans with Disabilities Act against the makers of games they like that don't feature turn-based play. That seems to be the preferred approach these days.
And what do you think happens to that oxygen it takes out of the air?
Answer: it combines with the hydrogen to become water vapor, which then falls on the ground as rain, where it sustains plants, which are busily converting carbon dioxide into oxygen.
As for "hundreds of rockets smashing through the stratosphere a day", compare the cross-sectional area of a rocket with the "surface area" of the stratosphere, say "gosh, that's a tiny ratio" and then stop to think how much worse all the petroleum fuels burned by airplanes are for the atmosphere.
Hell, next you'll be worrying about the fact that every launch slows the rotation of the Earth.
One of the beauties of the net is that a business can start up anywhere, as long as they can get the necessary quality of employees connected.
Your programmers don't have to live in Kalmazoo, they can be in Orlando or Dallas or even Podunk, Arkansas.
Your lawyers can be in Delaware.
Your mail-order fullfillment can be in Seattle.
The modern world is so distributed, you can plunk a business down almost anywhere, and take advantage of lower local standards of living for filling the less-technical positions, or of captive audiences at small local universities for filling the lower-tier technical ones.
That's how two successful national businesses have managed to grow up out of Ada, Oklahoma, population 24,000.
(Never mind that both have serious quality-control issues, and one has been found by at least one court to be a scam.)
The strongest point it has for me is that it works.
The RedHat updater has consistently crashed on my 6.2 workstation every time I have ever attempted to use it, through multiple versions.
Red Carpet worked great first time, and finally updated some things I was deliberately leaving sit (because they weren't vital) until I could hit them with a GUI. I could have updated them manually, but I wanted to test the GUIs more than I wanted them updated.
This is a good program. Anything that makes it easier for my grandma to use Linux means more cheap hardware and more drivers for me.
Think about what highschool and college kids are currently spending on pagers and cellphones.
Those kids weren't already getting pagers and cellphones for free when suddenly they began to cost money, with free alternatives still available.
The comparison you should be making isn't with cellphones and pagers, it's with Netscape Navigator. How many people do you think would pay for that if it suddenly became commercial again, with no free version available?
I don't doubt Napster would still spend considerable time in court, but at $5.00-$1.67x50,000,000users, I'm sure they will be able to work something out.
I don't think this assumption is warranted. I'll be surprised if more than 1% pay, and I'll be shocked into incredulous silence with my mouth hanging open if more than 10% pay.
Slashdot Mirror
RedHat may still say Fisher on their web pages, but Wolverine (Beta 7.0.91) is already out, and has been for a week.
-
Personally, I would much rather contribute to the "great rebuilding" than find some line of work I can do without sitting behind a desk getting fat.
:-)
You'd rather work in the computer industry than do something where you'd sit behind a desk and get fat?
-
Yeah, wait until the last minute. THAT'S a survival strategy.
You meek folks go right ahead and inherit the Earth; we'll be out among the starts. Maybe we'll preserve a few of you in zoos or something later.
-
Ooof. That'd be more effective if I hadn't mispelled "explorations". Mea culpa.
-
Pardon me for channelling Joe Straczynski while he's still alive, but if we don't start exploring other worlds with an eye toward eventual colonization, we're doomed. The sun will explode, and all of this, from Plato to Moses to Slashdot to ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US was a waste of time.
Allowing the GUARANTEED destruction of our species (the sun won't last forever) because we might hurt another would be immoral.
Yes, I realize we have hurt people and critters in our explanations. My wife and son are part American Indian. But they're also 100% alive.
-
It's a bigger problem if they haven't developed yet. If they developed a million years before us, they're probably still around.
I would think a species would be most likely to destroy itself in the first couple of hundred thousand years. After that, it's all gravy.
Well, not gravy per se; more like giant ephemorous energy-gathering constructs ~1 AU across, quietly gathering 99.999_% of the energy of their star(s).
-
It'll be encrypted all the way out your speaker wires to the speakers.
You don't get it; you still can't prevent copying that way.
The last two inches, it'll be unencrypted electricity heading into a magnet. Tear off the speaker, replace with a stereo mini plug, insert into sound card. Voila, encryption bypassed, $0.50 for materials at Radio Shack.
It's even easier if they make a player so I can use headphones; I don't have to wire the jack.
-
All BSA reddot gunsights go to 11.
If you have more, post 'em.
-
No. The government wastes most of the money intended for road maintainence. To understand why, go watch a road crew some time, if you can happen to catch them when they're actually there. If there's a cloud in the sky three counties over they won't be, but if they do happen to be, you can see them happily asleep in their bulldozers, assured that a combination of byzantine laws and union agreements will make it a multi-month process to fire them.
Then go watch how long it takes to build an access road inside private property. Those folks work for the customer, not the government, and are subject to not getting paid if they don't do the work.
Meanwhile, small towns are having a problem buying enough gasoline to fuel their ambulances, and people are dying.
-
I live, apparently, less than 500 feet too far from my CO for DSL service. I'm supposed to pick up and move so I can play Q3? Get real.
No, you're supposed to not play Q3. I assure you, your life will not end if you can't play one particular game.
Meanwhile, those of us who do happen to have broadband will enjoy the games that are targetted at us, and those without can go enjoy the games that are targetted at them.
Which, BTW, are often the same games, in different modes of play.
-
Same deal as oil companies: can they still make an insane profit if gas sells for $.80 per gallon? ABSOLUTELY.
Taxes on a gallon of gas are $0.405. That leaves less than 40 cents per gallon to account for what they pay for it, and their profit.
If you want to see your gas costs go down, stop bitching at the oil company; start bitching at your state government (which is, on average, adding 22.1 cents per gallon) and at the federal government (which is adding 18.4 cents.)
(All figures are from 1995. Many states have raised their taxes since then. June 2000 average was reported at 43 cents per gallon.)
BTW, the average is of the 50 states; the most populous states, with the exception of Texas, are all on the very high end, so the vast majority of Americans pay considerably more than the average given here.
Oh; and these figures don't include sales tax, which some states, such as Indiana, charge on gasoline.
Figure in the shipping costs (since the Clinton administration outlawed drilling in all the places where the most easily-accessible oil is, such as the ANWR) and you end up with a pretty meager per-gallon profit for the oil companies.
They get rich because they're selling an awful lot of product, not because they make a huge profit on it.
Capitalism isn't failing; our government has just herded us into a corporatist economy.
Capitalism is why you can afford to own a computer and non-metered dialup Internet access. In every county that doesn't have a fundamentally capitalist system, people who earn at your percentage of the income scale (guessing at where you are on the scale here) can't afford that, and can't get it free at their local libraries either because nobody can afford to donate to such institutions.
-
If I had all the money in the US, I still couldn't get broadband where I live.
So what? Does that mean all progress in game design must come to a screeching halt until the telco gets around to servicing you?
No, it doesn't; you won't be able to play Counter-Strike competitively. So what? Games are a LUXURY; if you were unable to play any new game written in the last 5 years at all, it wouldn't hurt you.
Go outside and play football, or move into civilization. The game designers don't owe you anything, and there are tens of thousands of games that will function perfectly well for you.
Go play Space Empires III. That works over email. Hell, I'll even play with you.
Go play chess. Go play Half-Life single player. Go hold a LAN party. Go download MAME and play Zero Wing.
Get over the whining; you're misdirecting it, it's the telco and the cable company that are screwing you, not Sierra and EA and Activision etc.
-
I think the ideal solution would be for Larson to executive produce it, and give Hatch creative control as the actual producer.
This will never happen since they're pissed off at each other, which to my mind means it shouldn't be made at all.
Either of them alone is going to screw it up.
-
There was a time when the complaint was that people didn't support computers that only had capital letters. We ignored them and used lowercase.
There was a time when the complaint was that door games didn't work right with monochrome text. We ignored them and used colors.
Now there are some games that only work right multiplayer if you have broadband. Poor baby, get over it; games are not a necessity, and even if they were, multiplayer isn't.
Get broadband. If it's not available where you are, start bugging the telco and/or cable company. If they won't act, move. Don't expect everybody else to make games that suck just so you can be competitive with a modem.
That would be like expecting them to make the games so that you could still be competitive with a 286 with 4MB of RAM.
-
If this gets made with Glen Larson's input and without Richard Hatch's (no, not the fat gay one, the fat one who played Apollo), it is going to suck like the original.
If, on the other hand, they INCLUDE Richard Hatch's input, it will be the show it always could have been, and should have been.
-
If you liked VGA Plants, you should try Space Empires III, or it's recently-commercially-released relative, Space Empires IV. Like VGA planets, it is turn-based, and can use transferred files so you can play with people far and wide. It has a bit more economics, and the ships are restricted by what you choose to research instead of by race, but it does have the minor problem that turns are sequential, not batch, so everyone is at the mercy of a single slow player. The graphics beat the pants off of VGA Planets, though.
SE3 was the yardstick by which I measured WINE performance for a long time, although now it's perfectly playable under it so I need a new yardstick.
A lot of people will not play real-time games because they have high blood pressure and it could endanger their lives. I had that problem until the right drugs were identified.
Perhaps they should file lawsuits under the Americans with Disabilities Act against the makers of games they like that don't feature turn-based play. That seems to be the preferred approach these days.
-
Reality - umm, how? Aaah, so they'll shut down the Internet in the Name of Holy Copyright.
Don't laugh. After all, they tried to shut down radio, and tried to get a cut of the sales of all blank recording media.
-
WTF are you talking about? I'm an atheist, you moron.
-
After all, I've got nothing to hide!
When you give the auditors the power to do whatever they please, someday when they come to check you out you will find the sad truth:
The auditor never leaves until he finds SOMETHING. If you don't believe me, ask any auditor.
-
And what do you think happens to that oxygen it takes out of the air?
Answer: it combines with the hydrogen to become water vapor, which then falls on the ground as rain, where it sustains plants, which are busily converting carbon dioxide into oxygen.
As for "hundreds of rockets smashing through the stratosphere a day", compare the cross-sectional area of a rocket with the "surface area" of the stratosphere, say "gosh, that's a tiny ratio" and then stop to think how much worse all the petroleum fuels burned by airplanes are for the atmosphere.
Hell, next you'll be worrying about the fact that every launch slows the rotation of the Earth.
-
One of the beauties of the net is that a business can start up anywhere, as long as they can get the necessary quality of employees connected.
Your programmers don't have to live in Kalmazoo, they can be in Orlando or Dallas or even Podunk, Arkansas.
Your lawyers can be in Delaware.
Your mail-order fullfillment can be in Seattle.
The modern world is so distributed, you can plunk a business down almost anywhere, and take advantage of lower local standards of living for filling the less-technical positions, or of captive audiences at small local universities for filling the lower-tier technical ones.
That's how two successful national businesses have managed to grow up out of Ada, Oklahoma, population 24,000.
(Never mind that both have serious quality-control issues, and one has been found by at least one court to be a scam.)
-
AOL only has 21 million, and it's taken them 20 years to get there.
You think Napster can acheive 50 million in a year? Or even five?
If not, the cost per month estimates floating around are WILDLY inaccurate, literally by orders of magnitude.
-
The strongest point it has for me is that it works.
The RedHat updater has consistently crashed on my 6.2 workstation every time I have ever attempted to use it, through multiple versions.
Red Carpet worked great first time, and finally updated some things I was deliberately leaving sit (because they weren't vital) until I could hit them with a GUI. I could have updated them manually, but I wanted to test the GUIs more than I wanted them updated.
This is a good program. Anything that makes it easier for my grandma to use Linux means more cheap hardware and more drivers for me.
-
Think about what highschool and college kids are currently spending on pagers and cellphones.
Those kids weren't already getting pagers and cellphones for free when suddenly they began to cost money, with free alternatives still available.
The comparison you should be making isn't with cellphones and pagers, it's with Netscape Navigator. How many people do you think would pay for that if it suddenly became commercial again, with no free version available?
-
I don't doubt Napster would still spend considerable time in court, but at $5.00-$1.67x50,000,000users, I'm sure they will be able to work something out.
You're assuming 50 million people will decide to pay Napster, instead of just using one of the many alternatives.
I don't think this assumption is warranted. I'll be surprised if more than 1% pay, and I'll be shocked into incredulous silence with my mouth hanging open if more than 10% pay.
-