As best I can tell, the enthusiasm over 'zOMG 3d printing!!!' is a combination of (optimistic) speculation about what they'll be capable of in the future, genuine enthusiasm for certain quite handy functions right now, and the fact that a lot of the people buzzing about them(especially, though not exclusively, the people who write about the subject but aren't too deeply immersed in it) really have no idea what sorts of fabrication techniques are on the table...
In a way, I suppose it really shouldn't be too surprising. With the dramatic gutting(not total extermination; but the relative decline has been massive) of the skilled-blue-collar/manufacturing sector, there are a lot fewer people out there who have a parent, friend, etc. who is a machinist or works with machinists. Anybody who doesn't go full-vocational-track-at-regional-school-for-that-purpose probably won't encounter much shop class in high school, either.
I don't wish to suggest that 3d printing isn't a genuinely interesting and novel class of techniques: the serious kit can achieve some geometry that you'd be hard pressed to get in other ways, or put out parts that are very similar to injection moulded; but in quantity one and less than a day; but part of its perceived novelty really seems to have to do with the fact that hobbyist 3d printing exists largely outside an environment where knowledge of machine tools really doesn't exist in a serious way.
The figures discussed in TFA are from popularity-contest. Debian gives you the option of whether or not to participate in that. If you do, certain information(including architecture) is sent back to the mothership. If not, it isn't.
I wonder how representative popularity-contest users are of debian users in general, and (to the degree that they aren't) what causes the non-representative behavior?
I know, just by way of example, that HP ships a bunch of thin clients based on their somewhat butchered version of debian, and it isn't wildly uncommon to find debian or variants in various other not-exactly-hidden-but-fairly-quiet locations. I assume that those generally don't participate in popularity-contest. Individual desktop users, by contrast, probably participate more frequently. Any other speculation on who might be overcounted and who might be undercounted?
As we all know, however much They don't want us to, the pace of 'innovation' in semiconductor fabrication is based almost entirely on the reverse engineering of artefacts taken from crashed Grey spacecraft.
Unfortunately, a recent downturn in the tourism sector of Theta Epsilon Minus, caused by the booming popularity of direct neural hedonostimulator technology, has sharply reduced our supply of samples...
Mining asteroids certainly seems like a worthwhile activity(practically a must if you want to build anything of significant size in space); but I don't really see the point of having humans on site for the purpose. Even on earth, where humans are dirt cheap and require no special expertise to produce and maintain, the economics of large scale mining seem to keep spitting out gargantuan machines designed to chew as much rock as possible with as little operator overhead and manual improvisation as possible. In the much lower gravity of space, you could likely get by with even fewer operators, both because human operators are suddenly much more expensive, making robots practical in more places, and because you need a lot fewer truck drivers when you can move enormous masses just by tacking a thruster on and giving it a shove in the direction you want it to move.
The business of chopping up asteroids seems like it would be an area that you would want to keep as many humans as possible away from. It might prove necessary to have a few somewhere in the processing chain; but(especially if you are mining within a few light minutes of an inhabited planet) you'd better have a problem that is genuinely beyond the capabilities of your robotics people before you add human crew to the design. They are delicate, they require substantial life support, and I strongly suspect that they would find life in an asteroid mining colony pretty horrible pretty quickly. Humans are volatile and ill-behaved enough in terrestrial extraction zones, and those are lush paradises by comparison to some asteroid colony pod....
Communications, I believe. It is just going where its inertia takes it at this point, and heading out of the solar system. It is obviously still under the gravitational influence of bodies in the solar system(and all the other ones, as best we can tell); but it isn't on a path that would be described as an 'orbit' in anything like the usual use of the term.
Depends on what compromises you are willing to accept, really...
One big killer in consumer electronics is that(if the state of the shelves is to be taken as indicative of what customers actually want) people apparently care more about devices being thin than about batteries being standardized, or replaceable at all... Barring a minor miracle on the Li-ion side, that provides a nice, hard, cap on the viable lifespan of most portables. It wouldn't be rocket surgery to standardize batteries(even if the AA is a bit old school, a standardized Li-ion rectangle could probably be CADed up in about 20 minutes and then entirely ignored by the industry at large); but there seems to be minimal interest in doing so.
Most of the rest would come down to either accepting component choices that are bad for BOM costs(ie. electrolytic capacitors are delightfully cheap for the performance they give; but they are born to die, doubly so in toasty environments, all solid caps is better, but costs rather more) or would constrain you to performance that is somewhat behind the curve(people run 130watt processors, with their demand for moving parts in the cooling system and tendency to cook their own smoothing caps, because they want something faster than a 1-10 watt processor can survive...)
Especially since it doesn't need to be rad-hard, you could probably build many contemporary consumer devices for a 35 year life span for not more than 2-3x the cost and a rather bulkier case; but good luck selling that...
Trying to settle on the Moon and Mars without such stuff is like trying to jump before even being able to stand.
I'd argue entirely to the contrary: Open space, from anywhere in high-enough-so-the-atmosphere-doesn't-get-you earth orbit out to the darkest edges of nowhere where Azathoth lurks in the dark places between the stars, is about as hostile an environment as one can reasonably imagine operating. Other than a reasonably steady supply of photons there is nothing there that you didn't bring with you(at considerable cost).
By contrast, any planet that isn't actively trying to murder you(eg. Venus and Mercury probably aren't at the top of the list) has massive amounts of potentially useful elements in the same gravity well as you. Just lying there for the taking. An overwhelmingly less hostile situation; but with more scientific novelty than just building a mockup in some place cold and dusty.
Satellites are crazy useful to the inhabitants of the planets that they orbit; but actually putting humans on them is a waste of time and space(with the one quite specific exception of doing low and zero-g medical research, which you can't easily do under other circumstances.
If you want cool planetary research, spewing robots at interesting planets is very likely the cheapest way to get it. If you want human populations that aren't on earth, colonizing objects that come with large amounts of free matter, and maybe even an atmosphere, rather than building teeny little bubble-capsules is overwhelmingly more practical. If you want to do research on long-term closed-system design and engineering, it's probably a waste to leave earth at all. Just buy up a bunch of warehouse space somewhere cheap, and you can run a dozen simultaneous experiments on earth for less than you could a single experiment in earth orbit(plus, if something goes wrong, you can just scrub the experiment, open the door, and resupply from home depot, rather than having to resort to mass deaths or heroic measures....)
Really, the only reason to have humans in open space for any nontrivial period of time would be research on how to deliver them reasonably safe and intact to an eventual planetary colony elsewhere(which may or may not actually involve sending humans at all. If team biotech can get amniotic tubes working, there would be some major benefits in just shipping a big cryo-flask full of iced zygotes, rather than dealing with adult astronauts....)
If memory serves, they haven't been OSS friendly in a while and the cards for which unofficial drivers exist are mostly antiques at this point.
(Probably more fundamentally, they fell badly behind in the performance wars, and digital video interfaces made their reputation for quality high-resolution analog output less relevant, and retreated into specialist multiheaded/2d workstation/display wall/etc. gear. I don't know how well regarded they are in that market; but it just isn't a very big one compared to consumer PCs and workstations that need graphical punch. You can't even find a laptop with a Matrox chip in it, and their discrete cards are alarmingly expensive unless your needs and their features align very closely.)
Fallout 3 worked just fine on my old core 2 duo with 2 gigs of RAM and an ati 4250. Not a crash or a slowdown once in 70 some hours. Perhaps the issue really is the PS3.
It wouldn't surprise me if the real killer is the '2 gigs of RAM' part of that set of specs... The PS3's RAM(while fast) was rather stingy even by the standards of its release date, and is absolutely non-expandable. On the PC side, all but the cheapest and nastiest desktops, and the cheaper or older laptops, may have only shipped with 1GB or so; but can now be bumped to 3(as much as you'd really bother with if still running a 32 bit OS) or 4 for under $50, so it hardly matters.
Plus, it's a great deal easier to compromise on visual icing-on-the-cake or resolution if the GPU isn't punchy enough. Much harder to neatly scale down your RAM requirements.
I think my favorite Fallout 3 outstanding bug is the 'Entire game locks up hard periodically on at least some systems with more than two cores" one.
Since the CPU requirements aren't actually all that high, you can change one line in a config file (or modify the processor affinity settings for the game process, though that is more of a pain) in order to confine it to two CPUs and entirely avoid the problem. Despite already having the pre-launch utility that detects hardware capabilities and produces a recommended configuration accordingly, they haven't deigned to add a simple check that does this automatically if more than two cores are present...
Yep, I'm sure it's a problem with bad programming, because good programmers never produce serious bugs, right? It's not like quality control is actually really hard, especially with large and complex software under a single unyielding deadline. Forgive me, but it seems like you've never done professional software development in your life.
In fairness to h4rr4r, Bethesda is notorious for releasing sprawling RPGs with absurd numbers of bugs(and not just technically challenging 3d-engine-developer-wonk stuff, bugged quests, faulty item stats, broken dialog trees, etc. are also quite common and can persist through multiple patches even after being conveniently cataloged on the assorted fan-wikis or even systematically cleaned up by 3rd-party mods...)
Software quality is definitely a hole with no bottom, into which even the smartest can fall; but Bethesda is undeniably a standout for "AAA big-budget titles from people who should know better that are crawling with bugs you can discover just by playing through once, never mind actually doing any QA".
I suspect that Shivering Isles isn't a terribly useful comparison. It's fairly large, in terms of quests and art assets and whatnot; but it is only modestly more demanding than any other part of Oblivion in terms of other resources.
For the PC versions, the minimum-recommended specs for Oblivion GoTY(Oblivion+all official expansions) are fairly modest:
Processor: 2 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent
Memory: 512 MB
Graphics: 128 MB Direct3D compatible video card and DirectX 9.0 compatible driver
Hard Drive: 4.6 GB
The minimum recommendation for Skyrim, no DLC, is substantially higher:
Processor: Dual Core 2.0GHz or equivalent processor
Memory: 2GB System RAM
Hard Disk Space: 6GB free HDD Space
Video Card: Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 512 MB of RAM
And, if you actually want it to look nice and play properly at higher resolutions, the recommendation is double that on both system and GPU RAM, and a punchier processor.
Obviously, direct comparisons are a bit tricky, since the Cell is sort of an oddball; but the PS3 only has 512 MB of RAM total, which must be a nasty constraint to work under(and it seems likely that Bethesda is having some trouble coping, even on the PC side, they cut the various battles in the civil war questline right down to the bone, with barely a handful of soldiers on each side and magic fast-disappearing corpses, in order to keep things running).
I am a trifle surprised that Bethesda can't get a gimped version of Dawnguard running on the PS3(ie. no improvements to poly counts, texture quality, environmental detail, etc. over the original release; but with the new items and quests and arrow-crafting); but I'm rather more surprised that Skyrim ever managed to be released for the PS3 at all...
The UK certainly does have that. Not necessarily a good thing; but the City proper is home to more financial shenanigans than virtually anywhere else...
I, for one, certainly remember the part where Silicon Valley's habit of sucking at the trough of massive defense spending and an excellent state university system doomed it to soviet-style stagnation and decay...
"Silicon Valley", especially the sort of latter-day web 2.0 Social bullshit that people seem interested in these days, isn't exactly a manufacturing-heavy operation...
Guaranteed by whom? What are they offering up as collateral; their firstborn sons? Yeah right. Why would any sane nation accept (i.e. Iran) such a proposal?
Well, any sane nation with a viable enrichment program might be a hard sell(which is an issue, since those are the customers that they actually want); but if I were Benevolent President for Life by the Unanimous and Wholly Uncoerced Assent of the People of some backwater hellhole or other, I could easily imagine that it might make decent economic sense to set up the cheapest, nastiest, scariest-looking bunch of fleabay-sourced enrichment apparatus that I could knock together, and then oh-so-magnanimously agree to halt the project in exchange for cheap, premade nuclear fuel and perhaps a little bit of 'development aid' for my fourth-best palace...
It's hard to do without ruining image quality or causing a CRT implosion; but shaving a bit of the glass off the front of the tube might help... They didn't use leaded glass in CRTs just for fun...
So, any word on how many man-years of sleep have been pointlessly destroyed by the fact that blue LEDs are now cheap and 'cool' enough to include in assorted consumer electronics devices where low-power greens used to be used?
Maybe I'm just turning into a cranky old guy in my old age; but the old, dim, reds, ambers, and greens in various blinkenlight panels were downright soothing. Now you plug something in(even something designed to be pointed at a movie-watcher's face, FFS) and odds are that a blinding blue point source will burn a hole in your retina. Even a boring domestic-grade pile o' networking gear can put out enough light to read by at night.
How much of this affect can be conclusively attributed to the light itself and how much of it is actually the adrenaline rush from the video game? I suspect hours reading boring documentation under the exact same light would NOT have even remotely the same effeccts.
It does seem pretty likely that stimulating material on the display has its own effect; but there has been enough messing around with boring light sources(ie. LED arrays in white or blue with no display content at all) to suggest that light itself packs a decent punch.
I suppose, if one wanted to be especially sure, a bit of research on subjects given the stiffest doses of beta blockers that the IRB will allow might be in order. If you crater the beta receptors, this 'adrenaline rush' phenomenon will not be an issue. Probably easier just to get approval to shine LEDs in people's eyes, though.
I'm told that the real downer is after the sun starts to die and you end up doing some quality lava-swimming before being engulfed and trapped within an utterly sterile, slowly cooling gravity well until the end of the universe, if any...
Unfortunately, helicopters(or even fixed-wing aircraft) are likely to be substantially harder on Mars.
The lower gravity is a nice bonus; but there is practically nothing to fly in. One 'standard' atmosphere on earth is a trifle over 100,000Pa. On Mars, just over 1200Pa is about the highest pressure known, with lows below 100Pa.
There are probably parts of Mars where a suitably designed atmospheric aircraft could operate, given that the gravity is a good deal lower and there is some atmosphere to work with; but it would be severely constrained compared to what you can do on earth.
I'm ok with the FAA loosening up on those poor, persecuted, electromagnetic waves that have historically been singled out for persecution and discrimination.
However, I would like to see the draconian measures previously reserved for in-flight electronics applied with redoubled fury against those who have the temerity to emit high volume and/or pitch sound waves, or substantial levels of visible-range electromagnetic radiation during nighttime hours. Those are the true hazard to consumer aviation.
I wonder how religion changes the answer rates. I'm an atheist and I want to live forever. The end of consciousness seems really shitty to me and people who say they want to die are crazy to me. As far as resources go, I'd settle for never having children if I got to live forever. That would stop a whole ton of my descendants from being around to use up resources.
I suspect that religion adds a somewhat unpredictable skew, depending partially on cultural orientation(religions differ pretty substantially in terms of how exciting meeting the boss is going to be, and what, if anything, you can do about it) and partially on individual personality and mortality salience. However, it would also likely bring in a fair number of people who refuse to answer the question.
If you (stiff drink recommended) head over to the Rapture Ready forums, you'll find an interesting combination in many of the posters: a deeply grim outlook on the hollowness and nigh-unendurable character of earthly life, along with a steadfast to being 'raptured', which they explicitly see as a non-death process. These aren't just the stock 'the dead are in a better place now' afterlife-y theists, these ones are planning on transitioning from temporal to eternal life without the 'death' step. It isn't clear where(if you insist that somebody choose from the answers provided) a view of life that could probably get you a diagnosis of unipolar major depression, combined with a fear of death sufficiently profound that even death followed by afterlife isn't good enough would fit...
He may actually be a fairly good example, in that sense. It isn't actually clear how much of scientific(and other) sorts of progress happens because people change their minds, and how much happens because the old guard gradually dies off and leaves room for the new kids who are no less set in their ways; but were updated to the newer ways before ossifying.
At very least, a population of undying crotchety old people would require significant re-thinking about how the labor market is supposed to work...
A series of all-you-can-eat Old Country Buffet locations, featuring 24/7 bingo and an impossibly confusing exit route would go a long way toward achieving a mutually agreeable settlement to this problem...
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As best I can tell, the enthusiasm over 'zOMG 3d printing!!!' is a combination of (optimistic) speculation about what they'll be capable of in the future, genuine enthusiasm for certain quite handy functions right now, and the fact that a lot of the people buzzing about them(especially, though not exclusively, the people who write about the subject but aren't too deeply immersed in it) really have no idea what sorts of fabrication techniques are on the table...
In a way, I suppose it really shouldn't be too surprising. With the dramatic gutting(not total extermination; but the relative decline has been massive) of the skilled-blue-collar/manufacturing sector, there are a lot fewer people out there who have a parent, friend, etc. who is a machinist or works with machinists. Anybody who doesn't go full-vocational-track-at-regional-school-for-that-purpose probably won't encounter much shop class in high school, either.
I don't wish to suggest that 3d printing isn't a genuinely interesting and novel class of techniques: the serious kit can achieve some geometry that you'd be hard pressed to get in other ways, or put out parts that are very similar to injection moulded; but in quantity one and less than a day; but part of its perceived novelty really seems to have to do with the fact that hobbyist 3d printing exists largely outside an environment where knowledge of machine tools really doesn't exist in a serious way.
The figures discussed in TFA are from popularity-contest. Debian gives you the option of whether or not to participate in that. If you do, certain information(including architecture) is sent back to the mothership. If not, it isn't.
I wonder how representative popularity-contest users are of debian users in general, and (to the degree that they aren't) what causes the non-representative behavior?
I know, just by way of example, that HP ships a bunch of thin clients based on their somewhat butchered version of debian, and it isn't wildly uncommon to find debian or variants in various other not-exactly-hidden-but-fairly-quiet locations. I assume that those generally don't participate in popularity-contest. Individual desktop users, by contrast, probably participate more frequently. Any other speculation on who might be overcounted and who might be undercounted?
As we all know, however much They don't want us to, the pace of 'innovation' in semiconductor fabrication is based almost entirely on the reverse engineering of artefacts taken from crashed Grey spacecraft.
Unfortunately, a recent downturn in the tourism sector of Theta Epsilon Minus, caused by the booming popularity of direct neural hedonostimulator technology, has sharply reduced our supply of samples...
Mining asteroids certainly seems like a worthwhile activity(practically a must if you want to build anything of significant size in space); but I don't really see the point of having humans on site for the purpose. Even on earth, where humans are dirt cheap and require no special expertise to produce and maintain, the economics of large scale mining seem to keep spitting out gargantuan machines designed to chew as much rock as possible with as little operator overhead and manual improvisation as possible. In the much lower gravity of space, you could likely get by with even fewer operators, both because human operators are suddenly much more expensive, making robots practical in more places, and because you need a lot fewer truck drivers when you can move enormous masses just by tacking a thruster on and giving it a shove in the direction you want it to move.
The business of chopping up asteroids seems like it would be an area that you would want to keep as many humans as possible away from. It might prove necessary to have a few somewhere in the processing chain; but(especially if you are mining within a few light minutes of an inhabited planet) you'd better have a problem that is genuinely beyond the capabilities of your robotics people before you add human crew to the design. They are delicate, they require substantial life support, and I strongly suspect that they would find life in an asteroid mining colony pretty horrible pretty quickly. Humans are volatile and ill-behaved enough in terrestrial extraction zones, and those are lush paradises by comparison to some asteroid colony pod....
Communications, I believe. It is just going where its inertia takes it at this point, and heading out of the solar system. It is obviously still under the gravitational influence of bodies in the solar system(and all the other ones, as best we can tell); but it isn't on a path that would be described as an 'orbit' in anything like the usual use of the term.
Depends on what compromises you are willing to accept, really...
One big killer in consumer electronics is that(if the state of the shelves is to be taken as indicative of what customers actually want) people apparently care more about devices being thin than about batteries being standardized, or replaceable at all... Barring a minor miracle on the Li-ion side, that provides a nice, hard, cap on the viable lifespan of most portables. It wouldn't be rocket surgery to standardize batteries(even if the AA is a bit old school, a standardized Li-ion rectangle could probably be CADed up in about 20 minutes and then entirely ignored by the industry at large); but there seems to be minimal interest in doing so.
Most of the rest would come down to either accepting component choices that are bad for BOM costs(ie. electrolytic capacitors are delightfully cheap for the performance they give; but they are born to die, doubly so in toasty environments, all solid caps is better, but costs rather more) or would constrain you to performance that is somewhat behind the curve(people run 130watt processors, with their demand for moving parts in the cooling system and tendency to cook their own smoothing caps, because they want something faster than a 1-10 watt processor can survive...)
Especially since it doesn't need to be rad-hard, you could probably build many contemporary consumer devices for a 35 year life span for not more than 2-3x the cost and a rather bulkier case; but good luck selling that...
Trying to settle on the Moon and Mars without such stuff is like trying to jump before even being able to stand.
I'd argue entirely to the contrary: Open space, from anywhere in high-enough-so-the-atmosphere-doesn't-get-you earth orbit out to the darkest edges of nowhere where Azathoth lurks in the dark places between the stars, is about as hostile an environment as one can reasonably imagine operating. Other than a reasonably steady supply of photons there is nothing there that you didn't bring with you(at considerable cost).
By contrast, any planet that isn't actively trying to murder you(eg. Venus and Mercury probably aren't at the top of the list) has massive amounts of potentially useful elements in the same gravity well as you. Just lying there for the taking. An overwhelmingly less hostile situation; but with more scientific novelty than just building a mockup in some place cold and dusty.
Satellites are crazy useful to the inhabitants of the planets that they orbit; but actually putting humans on them is a waste of time and space(with the one quite specific exception of doing low and zero-g medical research, which you can't easily do under other circumstances.
If you want cool planetary research, spewing robots at interesting planets is very likely the cheapest way to get it. If you want human populations that aren't on earth, colonizing objects that come with large amounts of free matter, and maybe even an atmosphere, rather than building teeny little bubble-capsules is overwhelmingly more practical. If you want to do research on long-term closed-system design and engineering, it's probably a waste to leave earth at all. Just buy up a bunch of warehouse space somewhere cheap, and you can run a dozen simultaneous experiments on earth for less than you could a single experiment in earth orbit(plus, if something goes wrong, you can just scrub the experiment, open the door, and resupply from home depot, rather than having to resort to mass deaths or heroic measures....)
Really, the only reason to have humans in open space for any nontrivial period of time would be research on how to deliver them reasonably safe and intact to an eventual planetary colony elsewhere(which may or may not actually involve sending humans at all. If team biotech can get amniotic tubes working, there would be some major benefits in just shipping a big cryo-flask full of iced zygotes, rather than dealing with adult astronauts....)
If memory serves, they haven't been OSS friendly in a while and the cards for which unofficial drivers exist are mostly antiques at this point.
(Probably more fundamentally, they fell badly behind in the performance wars, and digital video interfaces made their reputation for quality high-resolution analog output less relevant, and retreated into specialist multiheaded/2d workstation/display wall/etc. gear. I don't know how well regarded they are in that market; but it just isn't a very big one compared to consumer PCs and workstations that need graphical punch. You can't even find a laptop with a Matrox chip in it, and their discrete cards are alarmingly expensive unless your needs and their features align very closely.)
Fallout 3 worked just fine on my old core 2 duo with 2 gigs of RAM and an ati 4250. Not a crash or a slowdown once in 70 some hours. Perhaps the issue really is the PS3.
It wouldn't surprise me if the real killer is the '2 gigs of RAM' part of that set of specs... The PS3's RAM(while fast) was rather stingy even by the standards of its release date, and is absolutely non-expandable. On the PC side, all but the cheapest and nastiest desktops, and the cheaper or older laptops, may have only shipped with 1GB or so; but can now be bumped to 3(as much as you'd really bother with if still running a 32 bit OS) or 4 for under $50, so it hardly matters.
Plus, it's a great deal easier to compromise on visual icing-on-the-cake or resolution if the GPU isn't punchy enough. Much harder to neatly scale down your RAM requirements.
I think my favorite Fallout 3 outstanding bug is the 'Entire game locks up hard periodically on at least some systems with more than two cores" one.
Since the CPU requirements aren't actually all that high, you can change one line in a config file (or modify the processor affinity settings for the game process, though that is more of a pain) in order to confine it to two CPUs and entirely avoid the problem. Despite already having the pre-launch utility that detects hardware capabilities and produces a recommended configuration accordingly, they haven't deigned to add a simple check that does this automatically if more than two cores are present...
Yep, I'm sure it's a problem with bad programming, because good programmers never produce serious bugs, right? It's not like quality control is actually really hard, especially with large and complex software under a single unyielding deadline. Forgive me, but it seems like you've never done professional software development in your life.
In fairness to h4rr4r, Bethesda is notorious for releasing sprawling RPGs with absurd numbers of bugs(and not just technically challenging 3d-engine-developer-wonk stuff, bugged quests, faulty item stats, broken dialog trees, etc. are also quite common and can persist through multiple patches even after being conveniently cataloged on the assorted fan-wikis or even systematically cleaned up by 3rd-party mods...)
Software quality is definitely a hole with no bottom, into which even the smartest can fall; but Bethesda is undeniably a standout for "AAA big-budget titles from people who should know better that are crawling with bugs you can discover just by playing through once, never mind actually doing any QA".
I suspect that Shivering Isles isn't a terribly useful comparison. It's fairly large, in terms of quests and art assets and whatnot; but it is only modestly more demanding than any other part of Oblivion in terms of other resources.
For the PC versions, the minimum-recommended specs for Oblivion GoTY(Oblivion+all official expansions) are fairly modest:
Processor: 2 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent
Memory: 512 MB
Graphics: 128 MB Direct3D compatible video card and DirectX 9.0 compatible driver
Hard Drive: 4.6 GB
The minimum recommendation for Skyrim, no DLC, is substantially higher:
Processor: Dual Core 2.0GHz or equivalent processor
Memory: 2GB System RAM
Hard Disk Space: 6GB free HDD Space
Video Card: Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 512 MB of RAM
And, if you actually want it to look nice and play properly at higher resolutions, the recommendation is double that on both system and GPU RAM, and a punchier processor.
Obviously, direct comparisons are a bit tricky, since the Cell is sort of an oddball; but the PS3 only has 512 MB of RAM total, which must be a nasty constraint to work under(and it seems likely that Bethesda is having some trouble coping, even on the PC side, they cut the various battles in the civil war questline right down to the bone, with barely a handful of soldiers on each side and magic fast-disappearing corpses, in order to keep things running).
I am a trifle surprised that Bethesda can't get a gimped version of Dawnguard running on the PS3(ie. no improvements to poly counts, texture quality, environmental detail, etc. over the original release; but with the new items and quests and arrow-crafting); but I'm rather more surprised that Skyrim ever managed to be released for the PS3 at all...
The UK certainly does have that. Not necessarily a good thing; but the City proper is home to more financial shenanigans than virtually anywhere else...
Government? Really? Mmmmm. No.
I, for one, certainly remember the part where Silicon Valley's habit of sucking at the trough of massive defense spending and an excellent state university system doomed it to soviet-style stagnation and decay...
"Silicon Valley", especially the sort of latter-day web 2.0 Social bullshit that people seem interested in these days, isn't exactly a manufacturing-heavy operation...
Guaranteed by whom? What are they offering up as collateral; their firstborn sons? Yeah right. Why would any sane nation accept (i.e. Iran) such a proposal?
Well, any sane nation with a viable enrichment program might be a hard sell(which is an issue, since those are the customers that they actually want); but if I were Benevolent President for Life by the Unanimous and Wholly Uncoerced Assent of the People of some backwater hellhole or other, I could easily imagine that it might make decent economic sense to set up the cheapest, nastiest, scariest-looking bunch of fleabay-sourced enrichment apparatus that I could knock together, and then oh-so-magnanimously agree to halt the project in exchange for cheap, premade nuclear fuel and perhaps a little bit of 'development aid' for my fourth-best palace...
It's hard to do without ruining image quality or causing a CRT implosion; but shaving a bit of the glass off the front of the tube might help... They didn't use leaded glass in CRTs just for fun...
Radiation burns are a form of 'tan' right?
So, any word on how many man-years of sleep have been pointlessly destroyed by the fact that blue LEDs are now cheap and 'cool' enough to include in assorted consumer electronics devices where low-power greens used to be used?
Maybe I'm just turning into a cranky old guy in my old age; but the old, dim, reds, ambers, and greens in various blinkenlight panels were downright soothing. Now you plug something in(even something designed to be pointed at a movie-watcher's face, FFS) and odds are that a blinding blue point source will burn a hole in your retina. Even a boring domestic-grade pile o' networking gear can put out enough light to read by at night.
How much of this affect can be conclusively attributed to the light itself and how much of it is actually the adrenaline rush from the video game? I suspect hours reading boring documentation under the exact same light would NOT have even remotely the same effeccts.
It does seem pretty likely that stimulating material on the display has its own effect; but there has been enough messing around with boring light sources(ie. LED arrays in white or blue with no display content at all) to suggest that light itself packs a decent punch.
I suppose, if one wanted to be especially sure, a bit of research on subjects given the stiffest doses of beta blockers that the IRB will allow might be in order. If you crater the beta receptors, this 'adrenaline rush' phenomenon will not be an issue. Probably easier just to get approval to shine LEDs in people's eyes, though.
I'm told that the real downer is after the sun starts to die and you end up doing some quality lava-swimming before being engulfed and trapped within an utterly sterile, slowly cooling gravity well until the end of the universe, if any...
Unfortunately, helicopters(or even fixed-wing aircraft) are likely to be substantially harder on Mars.
The lower gravity is a nice bonus; but there is practically nothing to fly in. One 'standard' atmosphere on earth is a trifle over 100,000Pa. On Mars, just over 1200Pa is about the highest pressure known, with lows below 100Pa.
There are probably parts of Mars where a suitably designed atmospheric aircraft could operate, given that the gravity is a good deal lower and there is some atmosphere to work with; but it would be severely constrained compared to what you can do on earth.
I'm ok with the FAA loosening up on those poor, persecuted, electromagnetic waves that have historically been singled out for persecution and discrimination.
However, I would like to see the draconian measures previously reserved for in-flight electronics applied with redoubled fury against those who have the temerity to emit high volume and/or pitch sound waves, or substantial levels of visible-range electromagnetic radiation during nighttime hours. Those are the true hazard to consumer aviation.
Permit wifi and crack down on screaming children.
I wonder how religion changes the answer rates. I'm an atheist and I want to live forever. The end of consciousness seems really shitty to me and people who say they want to die are crazy to me. As far as resources go, I'd settle for never having children if I got to live forever. That would stop a whole ton of my descendants from being around to use up resources.
I suspect that religion adds a somewhat unpredictable skew, depending partially on cultural orientation(religions differ pretty substantially in terms of how exciting meeting the boss is going to be, and what, if anything, you can do about it) and partially on individual personality and mortality salience. However, it would also likely bring in a fair number of people who refuse to answer the question.
If you (stiff drink recommended) head over to the Rapture Ready forums, you'll find an interesting combination in many of the posters: a deeply grim outlook on the hollowness and nigh-unendurable character of earthly life, along with a steadfast to being 'raptured', which they explicitly see as a non-death process. These aren't just the stock 'the dead are in a better place now' afterlife-y theists, these ones are planning on transitioning from temporal to eternal life without the 'death' step. It isn't clear where(if you insist that somebody choose from the answers provided) a view of life that could probably get you a diagnosis of unipolar major depression, combined with a fear of death sufficiently profound that even death followed by afterlife isn't good enough would fit...
He may actually be a fairly good example, in that sense. It isn't actually clear how much of scientific(and other) sorts of progress happens because people change their minds, and how much happens because the old guard gradually dies off and leaves room for the new kids who are no less set in their ways; but were updated to the newer ways before ossifying.
At very least, a population of undying crotchety old people would require significant re-thinking about how the labor market is supposed to work...
A series of all-you-can-eat Old Country Buffet locations, featuring 24/7 bingo and an impossibly confusing exit route would go a long way toward achieving a mutually agreeable settlement to this problem...