If you're willing to expend your entire kingdom (or empire, or corporation, or whatever) so that you can crush everyone else, have you really served as a good leader?
Life. If you eliminate all of your other competitors, does it matter in a couple hundred years how your enemies might have been? Likewise, how do you know how good or bad the alternative would be? A short game with terrible results for the victor may seem much better when you include the centuries of peace and prosperity (and boring play) after.
What games force you to justify that expense?
Success is its own justification, when failure is extermination. A better question is what games prevent such a strategy, and how do they do it? And, is that mechanism just a Deus Ex Machina?
Maybe someone can explain why a proven and highly effective spacecraft like the Saturn V was retired for the space shuttle, which proved to be more dangerous, complicated, and expensive than NASA ever imagined.
Two words: William Proxmire
The shuttle was originally supposed to be capable of geosynchronous orbital flight, better reuseability, better capacity, and probably other betters that I am forgetting. Then NASA and the shuttle was proxmired to the point that instead of a DC3 to space, we got, at best, a Curtiss Jenny, all so that the dairy subsidies would continue to flow to his home state.
He is also the reason that SETI research in the USA or on US Government facilities has to be 100% privately funded.
> This means that SIP has nothing to do with your call quality
It lists preferred codecs so that the other end can choose, based on its capabilities, but otherwise, the ends have to be smart, not the protocol. This means that it doesn't have much to do with call quality, but not quite nothing.
If your client doesn't support the right codecs, and/or doesn't sort the codec list before sending it out, SIP will lose badly. Likewise, if the client doesn't switch codecs as transmission quality goes up or down, a SIP-controlled conversation can lose badly.
Mainly, though, SIP tries to be the IP equivalent of SS7, not control the whole process.
Yes...but how do you suppose you ever do make money on the Next Big Thing, if you never take what looks at the time like quite a risk?
Follow the Matsushita model. Wait for another company (typically, Sony) to pioneer a market, then make a slightly better version (at least in some axis, for instance, a VCR with less quality that can capture an entire normal length movie [which Beta couldn't, for a long while]) and move in. Even if you don't take the original market away from the pioneer, you still don't have to pay the expenses to develop the market from scratch.
OTOH, you don't have the fun and fame of being the visionary. You are just the boring follow-the-leader guy, making 20% on your investment compared to the other guy making 50% on things that pay off and only paying off a third of the time.
No, it is an out-of-date rating, with which most of us are familiar. It is equivalent to calling the Russian agency that replaced the KGB *as* the KGB, or calling KGB members Chekists. Or for that matter, calling an Emperor of Russia after Peter The Great as Czar.
> or that all the Jews should have been happy speakers of German
They were. Yiddish is a Middle German dialect, and it was spoken throughout the European Jewish community, as well as in the Americas.
Furthermore, they were happy as Germans. The first Iron Cross in WWI was won by a Jew, and the officer who recommended Hitler for his medal was, as well; per capita, they contributed more officers than the Prussian Junkers, let alone the rest of the Empire. They were, in fact, too successful as Germans, so much so that a certain failed artist decided to blame his troubles on them rather than himself.
> (The King James Bible mis-translated the Hebrew as "Do not kill")
No, that was a usage change. At the time, "kill" was a synonym for "murder", and the neutral term was "slay", whereas now "kill" is a synonym of "slay", and "slay" is on its way to poetic obscurity, save in FRPGs.
> Already it's becoming hard to tell the difference - whilst spellings like color/colour are well known,
And don't forget "whist" and "betwixt" (only used in American varieties in the phrase "betwixt and between", meaning all discombobulated).
> more subtle differences in British English such as practice/practise are already being lost.
NOOOO! That is my second most common misspelling. If the British drop it, how will I be able to claim that it isn't mistake, just hangover from recently reading a British book.
No, just the one _Iranian_ jet. We were helping Iraq (therefore Saddam) covertly, as they were keeping the Iranians from doing anything harmful to any other country in the region, by starting then continuing the Iran-Iraq War. Several years later (probably 10 or more) we found out that the night that the airliner was shot down, we were busy blowing up about 1/3 of the Iranian Navy while it was in port.
I do not know if we ever payed weregeld for the passengers on the civilian jet; I think that we were not paying because we expected that the mullahs would take most or all the money before it ever got to the relatives.
> Iran was very quiet for a long time, after the hostages came back.
Because they were involved in another war than with Great Satan 1 or 2.
This only happens at Nakatomi Plaza. Even then, the technician asking that the local grid be brought down was well known to the operator who actually did it (although I doubt that an FBI agent would be obeyed like Johnson [no, the other Johnson] was).
> look up "Liberty House" where the Conservatives are > trying to take away a Supreme Court Judge's home to > install a museum complaining about the act.
(1) Decision, not act.
(2) How will a museum increase the tax base?
The point of the decision was that neither the Federal nor that state's Constitutions defined what a "public purpose" was and was NOT, so anything that would increase the tax base could apply (whether slum/blight clearance, or taking middle class land on the theory that new tenants and owners would generate more revenue than the old). The original idea that I heard was to turn the justice's property into a hotel/convention center.
> Similarly we weren't at war when Saddam filled an airliner > with bodies from the morgue and bid it fly into a cruiser.
That was an Iranian plane, so Saddam could have had nothing to do with it. Their mistake was flying over the cruiser on a night when we busy were smashing the Iranian Navy. Ours was not being perfect in target discrimination.
OTOH, that, no doubt, made them all martyrs, and so fast-tracked them into the Shiite version of Heaven.
Geek - A carnival freak who bites the heads off live chickens Nerd - An excessively studious person. Frequently enjoys obscure recreations, like D&D.
Ozzy Osborne is a geek. Bill Gates is a nerd.
Ozzy had a reality TV show of his life. Bill Gates is worth more than most countries. Should he chose, he could buy his own reality show, The Nielson Rating Service, and at least one newspaper chain, and release evidence that his reality show was the highest rated show on TV.
> Am I the only one that thinks rewarding a virus writer in this manner is a really bad idea?
Bad idea for whom? The Chinese get a good virus writer to make more, as munitions against someone. It encourages others to try. This is no different than England knighting or ennobling "pirates" who took the Spanish treasure fleets or the Silver Train from inland South America, back in Henry VIII's or Elizabeth I's reigns. For that matter, it is no different than pardoning a successful bandit and employing him in the nation's army, as many medieval or earlier rulers did.
Of course, it is not particularly good for the victims of his earlier viruses (or of those he might later create for his employers), but then, we don't count in their accounting. Surely, you don't think that he is being hired for his database design skills?
> (1) Shit happens. But only if a concious entity observes it.
No conscious observer is required.
In the two slit case (the classical example of observer effect), if the detector that determined whether each particle took slit 1 or 2 broke, such that its reading were erased right after being made (say, disk drive head crashed and the OS ignored it), that would still result in two single-slit patterns adding together, rather than one two-slit pattern with varying levels of constructive and destructive interference.
> In the first half of the 20th century, a "geek show" was > a carnival act where a man would bite the head off of a > snake or a chicken and drink its blood.
And that was the correct definition of "geek" in the later half, as well.
OTOH, a nerd was someone who studied more than was thought sufficient (usually by those getting passes in Intermediate Basketweaving, ie, the jocks, vs the athletes).
The inversion that people seem to be suggesting is the equivalent of blacks/african-americans preferring that the rest of the world call them by the N word, rather than , or lawyers preferring to be called shysters.
I personally put it, "Ozzie Osborne is a geek, Bill Gates is a nerd. One goes around in a perpetual daze from doing too much drugs, the other owns the world. Which would you rather be?"
> Orion has already been obsoleted by a similar (but much more > effective) design using normal-sized nuclear explosions -- Medusa.
1) Given that neither exists, it is a bit hard to say that Orion "has been", rather than "may be", obsoleted. Bang-bang was tested in scale models using dynamite sticks rather than A bombs, and performed well, whereas Medusa is still just a gedanken experiment.
2) Medusa cannot lift off from the Earth's surface, and THAT is the difficult part. Now, I do think that there are probably ways other than setting off the first couple nukes in the atmosphere to get the fully fueled spacecraft into orbit, but until they are tested they remain just ideas, not practice. Economical ways, that is. Obviously it could be done with heavy chemical rockets, and just as obviously, it cannot be, due to cost, unless you have a Dinosaur Killer coming at you and cost no longer matters (in which case, Orion still beats Medusa launched conventionally).
> Still, this has very little to do with Orion apart from them both being nuclear pulse propulsion.
Agreed. This looks to be more like Daedelus, the British Interplanetary Society design from the late 1970s, except used in-system rather than interstellar.
> As it is, they are a lovely working example of the power > and value of the collective and proof that government > can work. Republicans hate libraries.
Most libraries are privately owned, by charitable organizations with no formal connection to the local governments. Franklin founded the first free library as a public corporation like he did the volunteer fire brigade, not as part of the Philadelphia City Government.
If anything, libraries are proof that aristocracies do a better job than democracies, given a long time scale. Most Boards of Directors are quite snobbish about who gets to be a member.
> I think a greater challenge would simply to define art.
Also, there is a problem that for most people, calling something "art" implicitly means fairly good art, as opposed to dreck that was also, technically, bad art. Frex, Martin Scorsese's Hollywood movies are art, his home movies might just be art (especially if he reshoots his nephew's 12th birthday party, as in the commercial), but my family home movies, even if Dad had attempted to have a story line, would not be called "art" because they were bad, not because they didn't share the artsy features of a Scorsese movie. Likewise, is Plan 9 From Outer Space really art? Especially, if it wasn't widely acclaimed as the Worst Film Of All Time?
> As much as any book, any song or any painting. Games are a compilation of all three of those.
Except that a museum catalog isn't art (in general) even though it might have thumbnails of art. So, that a game contains art doesn't make IT art, anymore than a catalog would be. Otherwise, my house is high art when we put the intercomm to the local educational station for background music while entertaining, with which proposition most would disagree.
> I have it on good authority that the world and the heavens are 4,500 years old, give or take a few hundred.
Except that you screwed it up. If the world was created in October 4004 BC (the Wilberforce solution) then it is 2007+4004=6011 years old this week (tomorrow, IIRC). Rather more than 4500. If you intend to appeal to a bad authority, get it right. Otherwise, the proper smart-aleck quality is lost.
BTW, did the good bishop ever reveal his calculations? I have the feeling that he issued a response accurate to the minute just to shut up people asking the question and demanding more precision than one gets from adding Genesis begat ages. Much like King Knute of England, Norway, and Denmark who made a big show of commanding the waves to stop to shut up his fawning courtiers when they didn't (boy, would he have been embarrassed if they did quiet down, for some reason:-)
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Life. If you eliminate all of your other competitors, does it matter in a couple hundred years how your enemies might have been? Likewise, how do you know how good or bad the alternative would be? A short game with terrible results for the victor may seem much better when you include the centuries of peace and prosperity (and boring play) after.
Success is its own justification, when failure is extermination. A better question is what games prevent such a strategy, and how do they do it? And, is that mechanism just a Deus Ex Machina?
Two words: William Proxmire
The shuttle was originally supposed to be capable of geosynchronous orbital flight, better reuseability, better capacity, and probably other betters that I am forgetting. Then NASA and the shuttle was proxmired to the point that instead of a DC3 to space, we got, at best, a Curtiss Jenny, all so that the dairy subsidies would continue to flow to his home state.
He is also the reason that SETI research in the USA or on US Government facilities has to be 100% privately funded.
> This means that SIP has nothing to do with your call quality
It lists preferred codecs so that the other end can choose, based on its capabilities, but otherwise, the ends have to be smart, not the protocol. This means that it doesn't have much to do with call quality, but not quite nothing.
If your client doesn't support the right codecs, and/or doesn't sort the codec list before sending it out, SIP will lose badly. Likewise, if the client doesn't switch codecs as transmission quality goes up or down, a SIP-controlled conversation can lose badly.
Mainly, though, SIP tries to be the IP equivalent of SS7, not control the whole process.
Follow the Matsushita model. Wait for another company (typically, Sony) to pioneer a market, then make a slightly better version (at least in some axis, for instance, a VCR with less quality that can capture an entire normal length movie [which Beta couldn't, for a long while]) and move in. Even if you don't take the original market away from the pioneer, you still don't have to pay the expenses to develop the market from scratch.
OTOH, you don't have the fun and fame of being the visionary. You are just the boring follow-the-leader guy, making 20% on your investment compared to the other guy making 50% on things that pay off and only paying off a third of the time.
> The "X" movie rating is simply a mock rating,
No, it is an out-of-date rating, with which most of us are familiar. It is equivalent to calling the Russian agency that replaced the KGB *as* the KGB, or calling KGB members Chekists. Or for that matter, calling an Emperor of Russia after Peter The Great as Czar.
> Are they modeled after Charlie Manson's by chance?
Why? Charlie didn't kill with his own hands. He directed various Family members to do it, instead.
> So the best way to protect yourself without killing the cat is simply never to open the box!
;-)
But why deny yourself the pleasure?
> or that all the Jews should have been happy speakers of German
They were. Yiddish is a Middle German dialect, and it was spoken throughout the European Jewish community, as well as in the Americas.
Furthermore, they were happy as Germans. The first Iron Cross in WWI was won by a Jew, and the officer who recommended Hitler for his medal was, as well; per capita, they contributed more officers than the Prussian Junkers, let alone the rest of the Empire. They were, in fact, too successful as Germans, so much so that a certain failed artist decided to blame his troubles on them rather than himself.
Grrrr. Ruff. Ruff. Grrr.
>Plus, it'll be easier to know if your cat is actually plotting against you.
Is it alive? Then it is plotting against you. First time that you forget to get cat food...
> (The King James Bible mis-translated the Hebrew as "Do not kill")
No, that was a usage change. At the time, "kill" was a synonym for "murder", and the neutral term was "slay", whereas now "kill" is a synonym of "slay", and "slay" is on its way to poetic obscurity, save in FRPGs.
> Already it's becoming hard to tell the difference - whilst spellings like color/colour are well known,
And don't forget "whist" and "betwixt" (only used in American varieties in the phrase "betwixt and between", meaning all discombobulated).
> more subtle differences in British English such as practice/practise are already being lost.
NOOOO! That is my second most common misspelling. If the British drop it, how will I be able to claim that it isn't mistake, just hangover from recently reading a British book.
> Wait; has there been two?
No, just the one _Iranian_ jet. We were helping Iraq (therefore Saddam) covertly, as they were keeping the Iranians from doing anything harmful to any other country in the region, by starting then continuing the Iran-Iraq War. Several years later (probably 10 or more) we found out that the night that the airliner was shot down, we were busy blowing up about 1/3 of the Iranian Navy while it was in port.
I do not know if we ever payed weregeld for the passengers on the civilian jet; I think that we were not paying because we expected that the mullahs would take most or all the money before it ever got to the relatives.
> Iran was very quiet for a long time, after the hostages came back.
Because they were involved in another war than with Great Satan 1 or 2.
> But Iran did one, too?
Nope, real mistake on our part.
This only happens at Nakatomi Plaza. Even then, the technician asking that the local grid be brought down was well known to the operator who actually did it (although I doubt that an FBI agent would be obeyed like Johnson [no, the other Johnson] was).
> look up "Liberty House" where the Conservatives are
> trying to take away a Supreme Court Judge's home to
> install a museum complaining about the act.
(1) Decision, not act.
(2) How will a museum increase the tax base?
The point of the decision was that neither the Federal nor that state's Constitutions defined what a "public purpose" was and was NOT, so anything that would increase the tax base could apply (whether slum/blight clearance, or taking middle class land on the theory that new tenants and owners would generate more revenue than the old). The original idea that I heard was to turn the justice's property into a hotel/convention center.
> Similarly we weren't at war when Saddam filled an airliner
> with bodies from the morgue and bid it fly into a cruiser.
That was an Iranian plane, so Saddam could have had nothing to do with it. Their mistake was flying over the cruiser on a night when we busy were smashing the Iranian Navy. Ours was not being perfect in target discrimination.
OTOH, that, no doubt, made them all martyrs, and so fast-tracked them into the Shiite version of Heaven.
> like that what's-his-name guy in the 'catch me if you can' movie..
Who was in prison, serving his sentence, when he started helping the government.
> What's the difference between a geek and a nerd
Geek - A carnival freak who bites the heads off live chickens
Nerd - An excessively studious person. Frequently enjoys obscure recreations, like D&D.
Ozzy Osborne is a geek.
Bill Gates is a nerd.
Ozzy had a reality TV show of his life.
Bill Gates is worth more than most countries. Should he chose, he could buy his own reality show, The Nielson Rating Service, and at least one newspaper chain, and release evidence that his reality show was the highest rated show on TV.
You decide who you would rather be.
> Am I the only one that thinks rewarding a virus writer in this manner is a really bad idea?
Bad idea for whom? The Chinese get a good virus writer to make more, as munitions against someone. It encourages others to try. This is no different than England knighting or ennobling "pirates" who took the Spanish treasure fleets or the Silver Train from inland South America, back in Henry VIII's or Elizabeth I's reigns. For that matter, it is no different than pardoning a successful bandit and employing him in the nation's army, as many medieval or earlier rulers did.
Of course, it is not particularly good for the victims of his earlier viruses (or of those he might later create for his employers), but then, we don't count in their accounting. Surely, you don't think that he is being hired for his database design skills?
> $133,000 a year is a heap of money in China.
It is rather a heap almost anyplace.
> (1) Shit happens. But only if a concious entity observes it.
No conscious observer is required.
In the two slit case (the classical example of observer effect), if the detector that determined whether each particle took slit 1 or 2 broke, such that its reading were erased right after being made (say, disk drive head crashed and the OS ignored it), that would still result in two single-slit patterns adding together, rather than one two-slit pattern with varying levels of constructive and destructive interference.
> Put a gun to your head. Pull the trigger. If you are
> still alive, you have proved the many-worlds theory.
Larry Niven already wrote that short story, as All The Myriad Ways.
> In the first half of the 20th century, a "geek show" was
> a carnival act where a man would bite the head off of a
> snake or a chicken and drink its blood.
And that was the correct definition of "geek" in the later half, as well.
OTOH, a nerd was someone who studied more than was thought sufficient (usually by those getting passes in Intermediate Basketweaving, ie, the jocks, vs the athletes).
The inversion that people seem to be suggesting is the equivalent of blacks/african-americans preferring that the rest of the world call them by the N word, rather than , or lawyers preferring to be called shysters.
I personally put it, "Ozzie Osborne is a geek, Bill Gates is a nerd. One goes around in a perpetual daze from doing too much drugs, the other owns the world. Which would you rather be?"
> Orion has already been obsoleted by a similar (but much more
> effective) design using normal-sized nuclear explosions -- Medusa.
1) Given that neither exists, it is a bit hard to say that Orion "has been", rather than "may be", obsoleted. Bang-bang was tested in scale models using dynamite sticks rather than A bombs, and performed well, whereas Medusa is still just a gedanken experiment.
2) Medusa cannot lift off from the Earth's surface, and THAT is the difficult part. Now, I do think that there are probably ways other than setting off the first couple nukes in the atmosphere to get the fully fueled spacecraft into orbit, but until they are tested they remain just ideas, not practice. Economical ways, that is. Obviously it could be done with heavy chemical rockets, and just as obviously, it cannot be, due to cost, unless you have a Dinosaur Killer coming at you and cost no longer matters (in which case, Orion still beats Medusa launched conventionally).
> Still, this has very little to do with Orion apart from them both being nuclear pulse propulsion.
Agreed. This looks to be more like Daedelus, the British Interplanetary Society design from the late 1970s, except used in-system rather than interstellar.
> As it is, they are a lovely working example of the power
> and value of the collective and proof that government
> can work. Republicans hate libraries.
Most libraries are privately owned, by charitable organizations with no formal connection to the local governments. Franklin founded the first free library as a public corporation like he did the volunteer fire brigade, not as part of the Philadelphia City Government.
If anything, libraries are proof that aristocracies do a better job than democracies, given a long time scale. Most Boards of Directors are quite snobbish about who gets to be a member.
> I think a greater challenge would simply to define art.
Also, there is a problem that for most people, calling something "art" implicitly means fairly good art, as opposed to dreck that was also, technically, bad art. Frex, Martin Scorsese's Hollywood movies are art, his home movies might just be art (especially if he reshoots his nephew's 12th birthday party, as in the commercial), but my family home movies, even if Dad had attempted to have a story line, would not be called "art" because they were bad, not because they didn't share the artsy features of a Scorsese movie. Likewise, is Plan 9 From Outer Space really art? Especially, if it wasn't widely acclaimed as the Worst Film Of All Time?
> As much as any book, any song or any painting. Games are a compilation of all three of those.
Except that a museum catalog isn't art (in general) even though it might have thumbnails of art. So, that a game contains art doesn't make IT art, anymore than a catalog would be. Otherwise, my house is high art when we put the intercomm to the local educational station for background music while entertaining, with which proposition most would disagree.
> I have it on good authority that the world and the heavens are 4,500 years old, give or take a few hundred.
:-)
Except that you screwed it up. If the world was created in October 4004 BC (the Wilberforce solution) then it is 2007+4004=6011 years old this week (tomorrow, IIRC). Rather more than 4500. If you intend to appeal to a bad authority, get it right. Otherwise, the proper smart-aleck quality is lost.
BTW, did the good bishop ever reveal his calculations? I have the feeling that he issued a response accurate to the minute just to shut up people asking the question and demanding more precision than one gets from adding Genesis begat ages. Much like King Knute of England, Norway, and Denmark who made a big show of commanding the waves to stop to shut up his fawning courtiers when they didn't (boy, would he have been embarrassed if they did quiet down, for some reason