It is probably both his pride, and cash. Look, strange as it may seem, and disregarding the few people who actually manage to avoid it, you can never have enough money.
Seems weird. But there are many, Many, MANY people who have so much money that they don't know what to do with it - yet they still work like crazy to make even more of it. Apparently you get addicted to it...
a) Keep in mind that it's usually not the developers who wish to implement DRM, but the managers, especially in large companies. Managers being managers, they are usually not worth terribly much, do not know the environment of their product, and simply follow the latest fad in some or other manager magazine.
b) You will never, ever, be able to stop the gaming community from pirating. It's been talked about for a long time, and the interesting data collection by Positech showed this very clearly. Thus we can drop this idea. Piracy will always exist, we can merely (somewhat) influence the percentage of it (and we cannot really measure that percentage, either).
So... ummm... you say that one missile isn't going to takle out a huge jet (built like a high-tech bicycle, I might add), but you could do it using an old stinger?
Another good idea (as demonstrated by Stardock with their games, for example "Galactic Civilization I/II") is to bring out a good, bug-free game without copy protection. And if the user registers, he can download the additions and extensions being developed for the next few years.
Works like a charm - particularly as you'll have good contact with your fans if you bring out a new game...
To allow you not to waste time on the review (as I did), here are some quick quotes of interest:
GameSpot Score 4.0 (poor) Tarr Chronicles is the painful combination of incomprehensible and insipid.
The Good
* Attractive space scenery.
The Bad
* Unintelligible storyline
* Incredibly peculiar dialogue
* Dull, linear missions....
English teachers should stay far away from Tarr Chronicles. Actually, let's go a little bit further and extend that caution to, well, everybody. Mangled English is probably the least of the problems afflicting this arcade-style space simulation from Russian developer Quazar Studio. Dull, repetitive missions make this one tough game to endure for very long, even when you're not puzzling over what the hell is going on due to the absolutely bizarre dialogue....
Given the head-swimming story, it's kind of a blessing that the actual gameplay is so simplistic...Virtually every assignment is a generic "destroy all enemy ships" jaunt...Even when there is a specific purpose to your sorties, you still don't do anything more than zip around blasting enemy craft with energy beams and missiles. This all gets extremely mind-numbing in short order, due largely to the excessive number of opposition ships and the subpar artificial intelligence....
Overall, there isn't a great deal of challenge on offer here, just endless repetition. The game tries your patience more than your flying skills and marksmanship....
There are some things that man was not meant to know, and Tarr Chronicles is clearly one of them. But unlike so many other awful games, at least Quazar Studio doesn't hide this fact. On the contrary, it pretty much wallops you over the head with its incomprehensibility from the very moment you load it up. So, you might want to thank the developer for not wasting too much of your time, if not for anything else.
Web based OS? Look, we can argue back and forth about thin clients and whatever - but let's look at something important: security. All your stuff goes over the web. Do you trust your ISP? Your gouverment? Microsoft? With all your data? Yes?
Well, some time ago I weighted in at 115 kg. That's a *lot*, and I was not happy. I found a nice trainig idea at http://bodyforlife.com/ - while I did buy the book, I found this not to be necessary: you can find all required data at the site. And no, there's no need to buy their advertised food-stuff.
Now I'm at 92 kg, and feel much better. And yes, it did go rather quickly. And I'm certain I'll reach my aim of 80 kg, even if it'll take some time yet.
Yes, you probably need a Gym, although you might find enough info on the net to do your muscle training at home, perhaps with just a few dumbbells. If you worry about being in a Gym, it's easy: use a walkman, set it to relatively noisy, do your training, ignore everybody. Simple;)
Here's what I do:
* Monday: Upper body muscle training. * Tuesday: Cardio (20 minutes, spike-form) * Wednesday: Lower body muscle training * Thursday: Cardio (fast walk for 68 minutes at 5.0 km/h and 15 to burn 1000 kcal) * Friday: Upper body muscle training
Would be good to do some cardio on Saturday, but I usually don't get around to it.
Some basic points about muscle training: * The BFL program is pretty good. You do a set of 12 movements, wait 60 seconds, do a set of 10 (with more weights), then 8 (more weight), then 6 (max weight), then 2x12 (less weight, but without any pause between them). The idea is to see your muscles fail on the second set of 12, no matter how hard you try. Yes, do this as hard as you can, curse at your muscles, try for juuuust one more... it really helps. * Perfection is if you can upgrade the weights on one of these movements every time. * Give your muscles an entire day to recover. Do not do the same training two days in a row, it's pretty useless as the muscles need some peace and quiet to grow. * Training is hard: you train to the absolute limit of your muscle capability. This is the best way of making sure your muscles feel the need to grow. Because: * Your body hates muscles. They are expensive to build up, and they are expensive to maintain, as a kilo of muscles consumes about 100 kcal per day, even if it doesn't move at all.
Cardio: * Spiked Cardio is nice, too. You start at a low level (imagine level 0 being in bed in the morning, and level 10 running away from a pack of wolves), slowly grow each minute, reach a spike, drop down to relax, and build up again. The whole thing takes about 20 minutes, which each level running for 60s. The levels look like this: 6 6 6 7 8 9 6 7 8 9 6 7 8 9 6 7 8 9 10 6 * You can use any form of cardio for this (running, swimming, skating, rowing, etc), but I prefere the Crosstrainer. Nice. * The long cardio is useful for flushing your body, loosing a lot of kcal in the process. It's not too hard (my heartbeat being in the high 150s), and I view a nice (short) movie while a walk fast.
Food: * I use low fat stuff, and avoid anything white (bread, potatoes, cheese, milk, etc). * Eat 4-5 times per day, about a handful of meat and a handful of greenery each time. Concentrate on proteins (meat). * Fish are good, turkey breast, Bananas, Apples... (check the BFL site for full details). Ü The amount of kcal you need per day varies (they have a calculator). I need 1800, thus this is what I eat every day - don't eat too little. * Sunday is your Free Day - eat what you want. Choclate, Pizza, Ice Cream - no problem. Yes, yes, you'll overdo it the first time. And the second. But you'll learn to limit yourself and not eat too much, and then it works very well. * If you see a nice munchy choclate bar in a shop - no need to think "Aaaarghm I'm not allowed!". Think: "Heeey, only two days until Sunday, then I can eat it!". Don't buy it yet, though - wait till Sunday (or Saturday afternoon in case the shop would be closed).
Well, many people complain about the shine and glitter. Apparently, it can be turned off. Other people complain about speed. Yes, it's lousy. Yes, a modern PC can handle it, but you do you want to loose performance? However, fast enough PCs, well, shrug... good enough for most things, who cares if you get only 70 FPS instead of 95.
My main reason for not using Vista is simple: they fell for the [RI|MP]AA babbel, and modified their system accordingly. Every internal data transfer is encrypted, in the moronic hope that this'll stop Jow Average from copying DVDs and the like. HD -> en/decrypt -> CPU -> en/decrypt -> GPU.
This eats performance. This is not what an OS should be doing. This treats me like a thief. This pisses me off.
a) They only want to control you via spy cam when you are working b) This is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT to spying on you via spy cam
Personally, I don't give a shit where they put spy cams, wether they'd spy on me while working, while sleeping, while pointing my arse at them. It is an idiotic idea, absolutely orwellian, and defending it, even partly, even because of some wording, is not exactly very... hmm, how do I put this... not a sign of a patriotic freedom fighting USA citizen who loves his country (phew).
Keep in mind the old 80/20 rule: 20% of your customers (users, in this case) cause 80% of the trouble. Solution: kick them out and stop wasting time on them.
Short email message "Thanks for your feedback, which I consider to be misinformed. Communications terminated." and either kick him off the forums or simply ignore him competely from now on.
And why you deserve this? Well, two reasons:
a) You are somebody who takes such idiots terribly seriously, and worries enough about them to ask Slashdot (Slashdot, of all places!) for help. b) In your previous life, you were a hamster and chewed through the cables inside a computer server.
If the company is large enough to create a successful, large MMO, you may be assured that they are exclusively interested in making a profit - no matter what their PR claims. Opening their code will not cause profit, probably causes licensing issues, and might distract from their latest game.
> Now I don't think even Dick Cheney could go along with the idea of a bomb-powered ship but I wonder if anti-matter would be a suitable replacement charge?
Sure... let's use something even more dangerous and violent. Using a couple of hunderd nuclear bombs to push a very heavy payload into orbit is an, um, strange idea. Makes very little difference (except in rquired size) if these are antimatter or not.
Using a nuke or AM will blow a LOT of very unhealthy stuff into the atmosphere. Doing about a hundred of them would be suicide, pure and simple.
Actually... I think (even;) Slashdot is right on this one.
ISPs should not check your email. It's noe of their damn business. ISPs should check to see if you're generating an excess of emails, slowing the net down for everybody (hey, over 80% of email traffic is spam).
Thus, yes, even I would allow them to have a look at email contents if the amount of generated emails exceeds a certain (very large) amount. However, they are most certainly not allowed to check the content every time, (even if) looking for spam or the usual eeeeevil terrarist.
There's a different reason for me to not touch Vista (next to the fact the our entire company (60+) is refusing to use Vista and thus the entire software we use and sell is being ported to Linux):
It is SLOW because MS listened nice and hard to the RIAA and encodes *everything*. HD -> encode -> CPU -> encode -> Videocard, nonsense like that. Apparently in the hope that 'theft' of CD and DVD would decline.
I refuse to have my PCs capabilities lowered for reasons like those. Yes, I have a massively powerful computer, easily capable of handling Vista. Yes, I want all that processing power. No, I am not going to waste it on security for a small part of the industry, which also has the habit of treating everybody like terrorists.
...can we begin to cut out that kind of crap, PLEASE? Sheesh, it is a simple fact that women are different from men. No, it's not Politically Correct. Yes, a lot of PC-fans are going to weep and shout and whine. Doesn't change a simple fact of the Real World: typically, men are more interested in science than women. Typically means: statistic majority. Obviously there are some women veeery interested in science.
But, please, turn off this PC nonsense. Have a look at the book "The Bell Curve" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve). Quite excellent, and demonstrates clearly some more stuff that the PC-people are going to find horrific...
PS: Yes, yes, I'm noisy about what I consider idiocies. But something very similar to this happened in South Africa, which turned into an environment with a very high amout of racism (favourising black people). And is thus falling apart, most good people leaving, and it's a real shame for such a very beautiful country. Simply doesn't make sense to say "80% population is black, thus 80% of your workers must be black" and similar stuff.
Wow, was I looking forward to this game. *Did* I love that free creature creator demo! Wanted to buy the full version, but here in Europe it costs 10 EUR instead of 10 Dollars. And when I sniffed about I found - secuROM.
And my happyness collapsed into a crying heap. SecuROM! And, yes, the full game will have it too!
Good-bye, Spore. I'm really very sad, but it looks like we'll never meet...
Oh, don't worry - it will be. They'll simply swear that they didn't change anything, that this eeeeeevil letter was written by you, and thus you obviously should go behind bars for the next 250 years.
(No, I do not trust the gouverment. Yes, they do crap like this all the time).
Sure. Last resort. Certainly. I mean, this may only be used if there exists an "urgent threat to the existence or the security of the Federation or a country or physical, life or liberty of a person". Obviously, this will immediately exist if they suspect that you might (yes, might) be a (drumroll, please) terrorist. Which, these days, can be the case if you're wearing a t-shirt with some armed superhero picture at an airport.
Furthermore, as we can see above, "Even where there is a reasonable assumptions on concrete preparatory acts for such serious offenses.". Which means, translated: "Whenever we feel like it. We'll simply claim it was a reasonable assumption, after all, that guy kept wearing such weird t-shirts"
I wanted to insert some 1984-joke here, but (living in Bavaria), I don't feel much like joking anymore.
Well, I lived there for seven years. Long ago. By now the entire economy is rapidly falling, inflation is climbing, the state is spectacularly corrupt, some of the leaders are positively moronic (the Minster for Health was kicked out of a Canadian HIV meeting when she brought up her very own methods for fighting aid, involving, if I remember correctly, potatoes and cucumbers or somesuch) and every bright chap I know is definitely trying to leave. No future for you in there.
However, the weather is lovely, and the people are very friendly - but stay in the Western Cape (Cape Town), avoiding the Pretoria/Johannesburg mess: highest criminal rate in the world per km.
>Definition of sailing: Sitting in a cold shower, ripping up $100 bills.
If you're willing to play races in modern plastic (GFK) boats, yes, you're right. However, very many people have lived beautiful lives on boats. Poor people, with little money. Lovely steel long-keeled beauties of sailing ships.
I grew up on one in the atlantic, and we didn't exactly swim in money;)
Designing a sailing robot is a great idea, as sailing can be quite a bit more complex than you seem to think... and the little bots could be used as autopilots later. Nice to get some sleep if you're sailing alone...
Project Orion is a nice idea (and used by Larry Niven in his SF), but the very concept is positively idiotic: let's have a big ship. Kick it into the air. Then it drops a nuclear bomb behind it, detonating it, being pushed forward by the resulting blast The smallest version, known as "satellite Orion", would require 540 atom bombs to reach orbit. The bigger ones up to a 1080.
Brilliant. Let's use a huge amount of nuclear bombs to reach orbit. Who cares what remains behind us, right? Right?
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations.
Treating me like a combination thief and little kid would guarantee my non-attendance, and I assume that I am not alone in this attitude.
It is probably both his pride, and cash. Look, strange as it may seem, and disregarding the few people who actually manage to avoid it, you can never have enough money.
Seems weird. But there are many, Many, MANY people who have so much money that they don't know what to do with it - yet they still work like crazy to make even more of it. Apparently you get addicted to it...
...and it won't be long after that that encryption will be prohibited.
Two things:
a) Keep in mind that it's usually not the developers who wish to implement DRM, but the managers, especially in large companies. Managers being managers, they are usually not worth terribly much, do not know the environment of their product, and simply follow the latest fad in some or other manager magazine.
b) You will never, ever, be able to stop the gaming community from pirating. It's been talked about for a long time, and the interesting data collection by Positech showed this very clearly. Thus we can drop this idea. Piracy will always exist, we can merely (somewhat) influence the percentage of it (and we cannot really measure that percentage, either).
So... ummm... you say that one missile isn't going to takle out a huge jet (built like a high-tech bicycle, I might add), but you could do it using an old stinger?
Aircraft are fragile. Even large ones.
Another good idea (as demonstrated by Stardock with their games, for example "Galactic Civilization I/II") is to bring out a good, bug-free game without copy protection. And if the user registers, he can download the additions and extensions being developed for the next few years.
Works like a charm - particularly as you'll have good contact with your fans if you bring out a new game...
To allow you not to waste time on the review (as I did), here are some quick quotes of interest:
GameSpot Score 4.0 (poor)
Tarr Chronicles is the painful combination of incomprehensible and insipid.
The Good
* Attractive space scenery.
The Bad ...
* Unintelligible storyline
* Incredibly peculiar dialogue
* Dull, linear missions.
English teachers should stay far away from Tarr Chronicles. Actually, let's go a little bit further and extend that caution to, well, everybody. Mangled English is probably the least of the problems afflicting this arcade-style space simulation from Russian developer Quazar Studio. Dull, repetitive missions make this one tough game to endure for very long, even when you're not puzzling over what the hell is going on due to the absolutely bizarre dialogue. ...
Given the head-swimming story, it's kind of a blessing that the actual gameplay is so simplistic...Virtually every assignment is a generic "destroy all enemy ships" jaunt...Even when there is a specific purpose to your sorties, you still don't do anything more than zip around blasting enemy craft with energy beams and missiles. This all gets extremely mind-numbing in short order, due largely to the excessive number of opposition ships and the subpar artificial intelligence. ...
Overall, there isn't a great deal of challenge on offer here, just endless repetition. The game tries your patience more than your flying skills and marksmanship. ...
There are some things that man was not meant to know, and Tarr Chronicles is clearly one of them. But unlike so many other awful games, at least Quazar Studio doesn't hide this fact. On the contrary, it pretty much wallops you over the head with its incomprehensibility from the very moment you load it up. So, you might want to thank the developer for not wasting too much of your time, if not for anything else.
Web based OS?
Look, we can argue back and forth about thin clients and whatever - but let's look at something important: security.
All your stuff goes over the web. Do you trust your ISP? Your gouverment? Microsoft? With all your data? Yes?
I don't.
Well, some time ago I weighted in at 115 kg. That's a *lot*, and I was not happy.
I found a nice trainig idea at http://bodyforlife.com/ - while I did buy the book, I found this not to be necessary: you can find all required data at the site. And no, there's no need to buy their advertised food-stuff.
Now I'm at 92 kg, and feel much better. And yes, it did go rather quickly. And I'm certain I'll reach my aim of 80 kg, even if it'll take some time yet.
Yes, you probably need a Gym, although you might find enough info on the net to do your muscle training at home, perhaps with just a few dumbbells. ;)
If you worry about being in a Gym, it's easy: use a walkman, set it to relatively noisy, do your training, ignore everybody. Simple
Here's what I do:
* Monday: Upper body muscle training.
* Tuesday: Cardio (20 minutes, spike-form)
* Wednesday: Lower body muscle training
* Thursday: Cardio (fast walk for 68 minutes at 5.0 km/h and 15 to burn 1000 kcal)
* Friday: Upper body muscle training
Would be good to do some cardio on Saturday, but I usually don't get around to it.
Some basic points about muscle training:
* The BFL program is pretty good. You do a set of 12 movements, wait 60 seconds, do a set of 10 (with more weights), then 8 (more weight), then 6 (max weight), then 2x12 (less weight, but without any pause between them). The idea is to see your muscles fail on the second set of 12, no matter how hard you try. Yes, do this as hard as you can, curse at your muscles, try for juuuust one more... it really helps.
* Perfection is if you can upgrade the weights on one of these movements every time.
* Give your muscles an entire day to recover. Do not do the same training two days in a row, it's pretty useless as the muscles need some peace and quiet to grow.
* Training is hard: you train to the absolute limit of your muscle capability. This is the best way of making sure your muscles feel the need to grow. Because:
* Your body hates muscles. They are expensive to build up, and they are expensive to maintain, as a kilo of muscles consumes about 100 kcal per day, even if it doesn't move at all.
Cardio:
* Spiked Cardio is nice, too. You start at a low level (imagine level 0 being in bed in the morning, and level 10 running away from a pack of wolves), slowly grow each minute, reach a spike, drop down to relax, and build up again. The whole thing takes about 20 minutes, which each level running for 60s. The levels look like this:
6 6 6 7 8 9 6 7 8 9 6 7 8 9 6 7 8 9 10 6
* You can use any form of cardio for this (running, swimming, skating, rowing, etc), but I prefere the Crosstrainer. Nice.
* The long cardio is useful for flushing your body, loosing a lot of kcal in the process. It's not too hard (my heartbeat being in the high 150s), and I view a nice (short) movie while a walk fast.
Food:
* I use low fat stuff, and avoid anything white (bread, potatoes, cheese, milk, etc).
* Eat 4-5 times per day, about a handful of meat and a handful of greenery each time. Concentrate on proteins (meat).
* Fish are good, turkey breast, Bananas, Apples... (check the BFL site for full details).
Ü The amount of kcal you need per day varies (they have a calculator). I need 1800, thus this is what I eat every day - don't eat too little.
* Sunday is your Free Day - eat what you want. Choclate, Pizza, Ice Cream - no problem. Yes, yes, you'll overdo it the first time. And the second. But you'll learn to limit yourself and not eat too much, and then it works very well.
* If you see a nice munchy choclate bar in a shop - no need to think "Aaaarghm I'm not allowed!". Think: "Heeey, only two days until Sunday, then I can eat it!". Don't buy it yet, though - wait till Sunday (or Saturday afternoon in case the shop would be closed).
Good luck!
Ciao,
Klaus
Well, many people complain about the shine and glitter. Apparently, it can be turned off.
Other people complain about speed. Yes, it's lousy. Yes, a modern PC can handle it, but you do you want to loose performance? However, fast enough PCs, well, shrug... good enough for most things, who cares if you get only 70 FPS instead of 95.
My main reason for not using Vista is simple: they fell for the [RI|MP]AA babbel, and modified their system accordingly. Every internal data transfer is encrypted, in the moronic hope that this'll stop Jow Average from copying DVDs and the like. HD -> en/decrypt -> CPU -> en/decrypt -> GPU.
This eats performance. This is not what an OS should be doing. This treats me like a thief. This pisses me off.
Simple.
Excuse me... you're saying that
a) They only want to control you via spy cam when you are working
b) This is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT to spying on you via spy cam
Personally, I don't give a shit where they put spy cams, wether they'd spy on me while working, while sleeping, while pointing my arse at them.
It is an idiotic idea, absolutely orwellian, and defending it, even partly, even because of some wording, is not exactly very... hmm, how do I put this... not a sign of a patriotic freedom fighting USA citizen who loves his country (phew).
Keep in mind the old 80/20 rule: 20% of your customers (users, in this case) cause 80% of the trouble. Solution: kick them out and stop wasting time on them.
Short email message "Thanks for your feedback, which I consider to be misinformed. Communications terminated." and either kick him off the forums or simply ignore him competely from now on.
And why you deserve this? Well, two reasons:
a) You are somebody who takes such idiots terribly seriously, and worries enough about them to ask Slashdot (Slashdot, of all places!) for help.
b) In your previous life, you were a hamster and chewed through the cables inside a computer server.
Enjoy your website!
If the company is large enough to create a successful, large MMO, you may be assured that they are exclusively interested in making a profit - no matter what their PR claims.
Opening their code will not cause profit, probably causes licensing issues, and might distract from their latest game.
Simple.
> Now I don't think even Dick Cheney could go along with the idea of a bomb-powered ship but I wonder if anti-matter would be a suitable replacement charge?
Sure... let's use something even more dangerous and violent.
Using a couple of hunderd nuclear bombs to push a very heavy payload into orbit is an, um, strange idea. Makes very little difference (except in rquired size) if these are antimatter or not.
Using a nuke or AM will blow a LOT of very unhealthy stuff into the atmosphere. Doing about a hundred of them would be suicide, pure and simple.
The worst thing about this is that, given our trust in gouverment and media, by 2021 we expect to see that kind of vague information...
Actually... I think (even ;) Slashdot is right on this one.
ISPs should not check your email. It's noe of their damn business.
ISPs should check to see if you're generating an excess of emails, slowing the net down for everybody (hey, over 80% of email traffic is spam).
Thus, yes, even I would allow them to have a look at email contents if the amount of generated emails exceeds a certain (very large) amount.
However, they are most certainly not allowed to check the content every time, (even if) looking for spam or the usual eeeeevil terrarist.
There's a different reason for me to not touch Vista (next to the fact the our entire company (60+) is refusing to use Vista and thus the entire software we use and sell is being ported to Linux):
It is SLOW because MS listened nice and hard to the RIAA and encodes *everything*. HD -> encode -> CPU -> encode -> Videocard, nonsense like that. Apparently in the hope that 'theft' of CD and DVD would decline.
I refuse to have my PCs capabilities lowered for reasons like those. Yes, I have a massively powerful computer, easily capable of handling Vista. Yes, I want all that processing power. No, I am not going to waste it on security for a small part of the industry, which also has the habit of treating everybody like terrorists.
...can we begin to cut out that kind of crap, PLEASE?
Sheesh, it is a simple fact that women are different from men. No, it's not Politically Correct. Yes, a lot of PC-fans are going to weep and shout and whine.
Doesn't change a simple fact of the Real World: typically, men are more interested in science than women. Typically means: statistic majority. Obviously there are some women veeery interested in science.
But, please, turn off this PC nonsense. Have a look at the book "The Bell Curve" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve). Quite excellent, and demonstrates clearly some more stuff that the PC-people are going to find horrific...
PS: Yes, yes, I'm noisy about what I consider idiocies. But something very similar to this happened in South Africa, which turned into an environment with a very high amout of racism (favourising black people). And is thus falling apart, most good people leaving, and it's a real shame for such a very beautiful country. Simply doesn't make sense to say "80% population is black, thus 80% of your workers must be black" and similar stuff.
Wow, was I looking forward to this game. *Did* I love that free creature creator demo!
Wanted to buy the full version, but here in Europe it costs 10 EUR instead of 10 Dollars. And when I sniffed about I found - secuROM.
And my happyness collapsed into a crying heap. SecuROM! And, yes, the full game will have it too!
Good-bye, Spore. I'm really very sad, but it looks like we'll never meet...
Oh, don't worry - it will be. They'll simply swear that they didn't change anything, that this eeeeeevil letter was written by you, and thus you obviously should go behind bars for the next 250 years.
(No, I do not trust the gouverment. Yes, they do crap like this all the time).
Sure. Last resort. Certainly.
I mean, this may only be used if there exists an "urgent threat to the existence or the security of the Federation or a country or physical, life or liberty of a person".
Obviously, this will immediately exist if they suspect that you might (yes, might) be a (drumroll, please) terrorist. Which, these days, can be the case if you're wearing a t-shirt with some armed superhero picture at an airport.
Furthermore, as we can see above, "Even where there is a reasonable assumptions on concrete preparatory acts for such serious offenses.". Which means, translated: "Whenever we feel like it. We'll simply claim it was a reasonable assumption, after all, that guy kept wearing such weird t-shirts"
I wanted to insert some 1984-joke here, but (living in Bavaria), I don't feel much like joking anymore.
Well... as far as I'm concerned, there has been NO intelligent life discovered on this panet...
Johannesburg? In South Africa?
Well, I lived there for seven years. Long ago.
By now the entire economy is rapidly falling, inflation is climbing, the state is spectacularly corrupt, some of the leaders are positively moronic (the Minster for Health was kicked out of a Canadian HIV meeting when she brought up her very own methods for fighting aid, involving, if I remember correctly, potatoes and cucumbers or somesuch) and every bright chap I know is definitely trying to leave.
No future for you in there.
However, the weather is lovely, and the people are very friendly - but stay in the Western Cape (Cape Town), avoiding the Pretoria/Johannesburg mess: highest criminal rate in the world per km.
>Definition of sailing: Sitting in a cold shower, ripping up $100 bills.
;)
If you're willing to play races in modern plastic (GFK) boats, yes, you're right.
However, very many people have lived beautiful lives on boats. Poor people, with little money. Lovely steel long-keeled beauties of sailing ships.
I grew up on one in the atlantic, and we didn't exactly swim in money
Designing a sailing robot is a great idea, as sailing can be quite a bit more complex than you seem to think... and the little bots could be used as autopilots later. Nice to get some sleep if you're sailing alone...
Pfff.
Project Orion is a nice idea (and used by Larry Niven in his SF), but the very concept is positively idiotic: let's have a big ship. Kick it into the air. Then it drops a nuclear bomb behind it, detonating it, being pushed forward by the resulting blast
The smallest version, known as "satellite Orion", would require 540 atom bombs to reach orbit. The bigger ones up to a 1080.
Brilliant. Let's use a huge amount of nuclear bombs to reach orbit. Who cares what remains behind us, right? Right?