Re your radar trap, it takes photos at the start and end of the trap. It would be obvious from the photos that you were not the one doing more than the speed limit. If you were living for weeks in fear, you simply don't know enough about how speed cameras work.
Hmm. Very good scenes in it, certainly, and the writing generally is good. The deus-ex-machina ending is *very* poor though (don't tell me it leads into the other books; it was supposed to be a single book until it sold well), and the happy-ever-after bit with all the heroes and heroines pairing off just sucked.
I'm just plowing through the "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" series from Tad Williams ATM. It's good so far. Warning: the main criticism ppl have is that it's too slow. Fair enough, but the fact that everyone spends a lot of time talking means that you get to care about them, so when they get killed, you don't think that the remaining ppl are being wimps when it affects them. Ppl who you thought were fixtures suddenly get wiped out; it's more "realistic" in that way than most other fantasy series. And the main characters therefore have a more realistic "humane" approach to the constant death around them than the Gimli/Legolas head-hunting competition, where you never feel either was ever in any danger.
BTW, not anything like any of these, and completely off-topic, but try "Grass" by Sherri Tepper for the best book I've ever read (it's kind of loose SF/fantasy). If I had to cut my shelves down to one book only, it would probably be this one.
It's only his first work in that in order to write tH and LotR be decided to work out more of the "back-story" behind the world. He didn't start making it into proper book/story-form until much later, although being the person that he was, I'm sure there were many individual bits completed.
Which I guess is why it's so damn difficult to follow - it was only intended as Tolkein's "research notes" and not as a book in its own right.
On the "contaminating" side, check out the vitrification process. Turn the waste to glass (highly radioactive glass, obviously, but still solid). No leaks then.
It's easy to predict how much radiation will penetrate how much ground, so bury it deep and job done. If you're worried about it, don't live near there (hell, the US is big enough you hardly need to worry about that - plenty of places with big areas of sod all!).
Re the birth defects, there's no proven correlation between nuclear storage sites and any birth defects. Also compare and contrast to coal-fired power station emissions which have been shown decades ago to cause birth defects, illness, acid rain, deforestation, death of wildlife in area, etc. Air-scrubbers exist to prevent this, but few power stations use them bcos they cost money to set up and use, and most governments won't mandate them.
And just bcos ppl are fighting it, it doesn't mean it's not a good idea. For a US example, 150 years ago half a nation fought to keep slavery in place! Most ppl don't understand nuclear, or have been given misinformation by anti-nuclear protestors - either way, ppl get frightened and don't react logically. And with the gov involved too, you get all the anti-gov conspiracies in there too. Logic tends to have a poor survival rate in this situation.
The main application, as ever, is military. If the Army can pin-point each of their soldiers and determine easily whether they're alive, dead or injured, they'll be *very* happy. Triage becomes much easier if you know the guy is alive before you go over to him, and if you're wounded then your guys can check that you're still alive before they come to get you under fire.
Tracking convicted felons sounds a perfect use as well, though. Anyone who thinks this is invasion of privacy, think again - a convicted felon has NO right of privacy, bcos you need to be sure they won't reoffend during their parole period. As a convicted felon, you have a choice - either stay in your cell with Bubba, or get out into the real world but have restrictions on where you can go, what you can do, and and at what time. Take your pick. Personally I reckon anyone allowed out of prison early with a curfew imposed has got pretty damn lucky, compared to the alternative. Of course there is also the point that after the parole period, you'll need to be sure the device is turned off - leaving it on forever *would* be invasion of privacy, unless your crime is such (eg. child molesting) that you are banned for life from entering certain areas such as school zones.
Correct, it was fraud. Unless you have physically removed money from me without my permission or electronically transferred money directly out of my bank account without my permission, you have not stolen from me. Sure, you've defrauded me, so I may go round and torch your car and house, but theft and fraud are two different crimes. Even Enron was fraud, regardless of who lost how much. However strongly you feel about it, it doesn't change the legal situation.
I've yet to find anyone who claims that VR is "knowledge Man should not know". AI maybe, but only in laughable films like the Matrix or the Terminator.
Computers are already capable of programming themselves - all we need to do is give them some human-readable text and they produce code. It's called a compiler. Auto-code generators from Matlab Simulink diagrams and similar are also here already. I should point out that I'm only being halfway facetious here, but you get the idea - what changes isn't the problem but the method you use to solve it.
I know what you mean though - a computer where you can tell it what to do in human terms and it does it. I know it's a long way ahead, but I'm pretty confident we won't live to see that. The problem is not so much CS and MHz as philosophy - no-one has much of a clue how to attack the problem. People are coming up with programs they claim "have the brain capacity of a grasshopper" or something like that, but all it amounts to is that they have something that's able to follow its preprogrammed instincts - those little photovore robots look fun but they're no great step forward. The problem is that awareness isn't something you can brute-force like chess.
I know someone's going to flame me: "How can you predict decades ahead? Look at all the predictions about computers!" Fair enough. However, also look at all the predictions about space travel a few decades ago, not least SDI. Some predictions are always wildly exceeded, and some predictions come to nothing. I've a feeling until we know more about what makes us aware, we don't have much of a hope in replicating that in silicon.
Re your first point, that only happens if you publicly announce your intention to beat MS like a drum with your new software (viz Netscape). Whoops.
What MS will do is approach the company and its investors and say "I want to buy this company out for 10 times its market value". Sucks to have your work traded as a commodity, sure, but financially it's profitable for everyone.
On the OSS competition side, all that you need to do is spend more time on developing the product than the OSS guys do, and pay more attention to your customers. If you develop a product and then just let it stagnate for a couple of years (I'm thinking many niche-market apps like Select Yourdon, etc) then you're dead, and rightly so. But if you keep developing faster than the OSS guys (and let's face it, you'll have at least 2 years head-start) then you should be sorted. And even if the OSS guys eventually catch up, it's still not necessarily the end of the game - people can then decide whether they'd rather pay for the commercial version or get the free one. It's not uncommon (PartitionMagic, for instance) for the commercial one to succeed in spite of OSS competition.
Bone deterioration AFAIK is generally held to be a lack-of-gravity issue. Flight attendants on a 747 (and especially Concorde) don't suffer bone deterioration. Maybe there's issues with being further from the Earth that gives less protection, I'll grant you that, bcos we don't yet have anywhere outside the Earth with gravity to prove/disprove your theory.
Electricity to regrow amputated limbs? I believe not on humans. Some animals will regrow limbs anyway (eg. starfish) and I believe there is investigation into how to GM other animals into doing it.
Re your question about "any valid research", it's impossible to prove a negative - anyone who's ever taken an interest in research should know that. In fact EM fields are distorted by tissue (that's the principle behind an MRI scanner) so I could well imagine that there could be some effects at large doses. However MRI uses mindbogglingly large fields to produce any measurable effect. By analogy, hammering a nail into you is damaging, but your body is tolerant to (and in fact requires) a small amount of iron taken in food. Studies are still in progress on this, so you could well be proved right, but so far they've not found any significant link.
"Countless studies on how you can easily cure cancer"??? I suggest you talk to the doctors and to the cancer-research charities such as Macmillan in the UK, who are still desperately looking for how to do this. Surprisingly, they don't seem to have announced a breakthrough cure for all cancers...
As far as "undetectable" goes, you need to know one very important thing about how MRI works. It generates MASSIVE magnetic fields (hence the first initial M for "magnetic").
How many people have something metal on them at this time? A belt buckle? Pocket change? Metal eyelets on your shoes? Surgical steel pins in your pelvis? An MRI will convert all of these into projectiles! So yes, it would be undetectable, provided you didn't notice your loose change exploding like a Claymore mine and blowing your legs off...
Many metals are immune to magnetic effects (copper for one), but iron is very strongly affected. And unfortunately for MRI-ing people, most of us have some steel somewhere in our clothing, so "undetectable MRI" is basically impossible.
Except remove the porn, and that's exactly what "Harry Potter" and similar kids' books have done (Roald Dahl is another good one). Reading rates are way higher now than before amongst the HP target audience.
If reading is interesting, kids'll read. Blame that problem on kids being given "See Spot run" books to learn with instead of anything more interesting. If I'd learnt to read by seeing Spot run and Janet and John being fucking twee, I'd rather be illiterate too.
(BTW, don't tell me about Harry Potter porn. I really don't want to know about broomsticks, or wands, or what centaurs get up to of an evening. Or Janet and John and Spot, either.;-)
It comes back to the same thing as this game-based stuff, anyway - let kids learn in a format they're happy with, rather than a format you're happy with.
Depends. If the first one is anything to go by, anyone interested in good films should be.
The first film suffered from too much cutting. Jackson himself said that they had to make Frodo the focus of the first film, and cut anything that didn't really affect him. So other characters became flatter - only Aragorn got any depth at all. The special edition restored a whole lot of stuff that was cut which boosted the other characters from "also-rans" into a real ensemble piece.
The second film IMHO suffered even worse from this, because there *was* no "focus point". So you get stuff like Gimli becoming the comic relief and not much more. Hopefully the special edition will improve on this kind of thing in the same way that the first film did.
Also, of course, if you're at all interested in visual effects and how they're produced then the special edition which shows how some of the shots were made is essential viewing. This is definitely a side-issue though compared to getting a "better" version of the film.
Suppose Mozilla had renamed their browser "emacs" or "vi". Would that get your attention?
Or is it only rude to do something like this to a more minor project which hasn't got the same publicity, and when you've got all AOL's dollars behind you?
Picking this name was not the problem. Picking this name *after* doing a name search and ignoring the pre-existing project, *and* copping a "fuck-you" attitude when asked to play nicely, now that's the problem...
We currently use VSS version 6. Before that, we used version 5.
On version 5, SourceSafe would occasionally extract a random character or several from somewhere in a text file when you checked it in, and plonk that character at the end of the file. If you were lucky, the character(s) would be from some identifiable part of the code which would cause it to stop compiling, so you could trace the problem. If you were unlucky, the character(s) would be deleted from a comment and you wouldn't have a hope of finding it. If you were *real* unlucky, the character(s) would be deleted from code such that it still compiled (eg. 10u would become 1u) and then you were *really* screwed.
Occasionally it did it to binary files as well. This was particularly bad news for Word files, as they were then irretrievably corrupted.
On version 6, we've not had any loss of data yet. However we do have an interesting bug with labels, where when we label a file it says something about labels.ini being bad or some similar guff. The label succeeds, and ANALYSE shows no problems.
TortoiseCVS isn't a bad solution for day-to-day version control, although it sucks badly if you want to roll back to a previous version. WinCVS provides more control over CVS, but with a crummy user interface (par for the course with OSS, and to be fair it's not too much worse than SourceSafe).
For those who don't know, back 15 years ago when I started, they were all very dark. The basic concept in each scenario was that humanity and the various other races were being overwhelmed by the forces of Chaos (think demons and devils). But the state of humanity in each case made you unsure whether them winning would be a good thing - the WH Fantasy side made a big thing of the corruption of human society, and the 40K side made a big deal of the fact that the human Empire sacrificed psychic people to their god-emperor and all the various worlds were basically lapsing into barbarism.
Then GW changed their marketing, and targetted the game at 12-year-olds.
Suddenly all the new figures changed into WWF stereotypes, and all the art-work got the bright cartoony colours and heroic poses. Every race became a caricature - heroic humans, elegantly-dissipated elves, comic-turn orcs, etc. The game rules got over-simplified so that kiddies could understand them. And it all sucked, big-time.
Simple. The miniatures are bloody expensive, and they market the hell out of the most expensive ones. I quit (well, I'd really quit much earlier, but I totally gave up on ever restarting) when I found they were trying to flog a £20 miniature, and that was 5 years back.
Bearing in mind that GW is exclusively marketed at young teens (15 would be the top-end age) then these prices are phenomenal. I presume only kids with rich daddies can do it now - I don't think I'd bother starting now, given the cost. There are other systems out there which would probably be better, it's just that GW are one of the bigger outlets (at least in Britain) so they get a bit of a lock-in.
What most people twig to is if someone else can, and has a good chance of using it to beat you to death with the result, you should learn how to do it too.
Re nanobots, check out The Diamond Age for a few nasty ideas (cookie cutters, torture bots that go straight for the nervous system, plagues of bots to attack specific racial groups, etc). You don't know nanotech, you can't engineer your own hunter-killer bots to neutralise the opposing ones. This would be a Bad Thing.
Sure, it can ruin it. But that's just a negative attribute, saying that unless it's done reasonably well then it'll damage the experience. No-one ever bought a game bcos it had *really* *good* network code.;-) Even with graphics, really good graphics won't actually do much to keep people playing (think of all those so-so FPSes).
What makes a game successful is the gameplay every time, not anything technical. The technical side just stops it being a failure. And in the entertainment industry with hordes of so-so films and games, wouldn't you like your game to be recognised as "good" rather simply "not totally bad"?
The whitespace-only language is obviously a joke, but it's practical enough that you could (if you were perverse enough!) actually use it. More of an "oh-my-god-that's-so-wierd" than a genuine April Fool.
The "BSDs to be merged" story has to take first place though, simply for the following line:-
Of the two hundred eighty-nine casualties suffered by the UN troops at this time, the commanding officer insists that they were caused by a rampaging Canadian moose. Daniel Hartmeier, previously of the OpenBSD Project, insists that OpenBSD has no weapons of moose destruction.
Would *you* bet the company on ESR's theories? Given that there has never, to date, been a successful open-source-based company? (Please don't quote IBM or HP, they make their money from hardware. Also please don't quote RH, I could make more profit from owning a newspaper stand than from investing in RH.)
Slashdot Mirror
Re your radar trap, it takes photos at the start and end of the trap. It would be obvious from the photos that you were not the one doing more than the speed limit. If you were living for weeks in fear, you simply don't know enough about how speed cameras work.
Grab.
Hmm. Very good scenes in it, certainly, and the writing generally is good. The deus-ex-machina ending is *very* poor though (don't tell me it leads into the other books; it was supposed to be a single book until it sold well), and the happy-ever-after bit with all the heroes and heroines pairing off just sucked.
I'm just plowing through the "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" series from Tad Williams ATM. It's good so far. Warning: the main criticism ppl have is that it's too slow. Fair enough, but the fact that everyone spends a lot of time talking means that you get to care about them, so when they get killed, you don't think that the remaining ppl are being wimps when it affects them. Ppl who you thought were fixtures suddenly get wiped out; it's more "realistic" in that way than most other fantasy series. And the main characters therefore have a more realistic "humane" approach to the constant death around them than the Gimli/Legolas head-hunting competition, where you never feel either was ever in any danger.
BTW, not anything like any of these, and completely off-topic, but try "Grass" by Sherri Tepper for the best book I've ever read (it's kind of loose SF/fantasy). If I had to cut my shelves down to one book only, it would probably be this one.
Grab.
It's only his first work in that in order to write tH and LotR be decided to work out more of the "back-story" behind the world. He didn't start making it into proper book/story-form until much later, although being the person that he was, I'm sure there were many individual bits completed.
Which I guess is why it's so damn difficult to follow - it was only intended as Tolkein's "research notes" and not as a book in its own right.
Grab.
On the "contaminating" side, check out the vitrification process. Turn the waste to glass (highly radioactive glass, obviously, but still solid). No leaks then.
It's easy to predict how much radiation will penetrate how much ground, so bury it deep and job done. If you're worried about it, don't live near there (hell, the US is big enough you hardly need to worry about that - plenty of places with big areas of sod all!).
Re the birth defects, there's no proven correlation between nuclear storage sites and any birth defects. Also compare and contrast to coal-fired power station emissions which have been shown decades ago to cause birth defects, illness, acid rain, deforestation, death of wildlife in area, etc. Air-scrubbers exist to prevent this, but few power stations use them bcos they cost money to set up and use, and most governments won't mandate them.
And just bcos ppl are fighting it, it doesn't mean it's not a good idea. For a US example, 150 years ago half a nation fought to keep slavery in place! Most ppl don't understand nuclear, or have been given misinformation by anti-nuclear protestors - either way, ppl get frightened and don't react logically. And with the gov involved too, you get all the anti-gov conspiracies in there too. Logic tends to have a poor survival rate in this situation.
Grab.
Don't be fooled by the "Big Brother" rubbish.
The main application, as ever, is military. If the Army can pin-point each of their soldiers and determine easily whether they're alive, dead or injured, they'll be *very* happy. Triage becomes much easier if you know the guy is alive before you go over to him, and if you're wounded then your guys can check that you're still alive before they come to get you under fire.
Tracking convicted felons sounds a perfect use as well, though. Anyone who thinks this is invasion of privacy, think again - a convicted felon has NO right of privacy, bcos you need to be sure they won't reoffend during their parole period. As a convicted felon, you have a choice - either stay in your cell with Bubba, or get out into the real world but have restrictions on where you can go, what you can do, and and at what time. Take your pick. Personally I reckon anyone allowed out of prison early with a curfew imposed has got pretty damn lucky, compared to the alternative. Of course there is also the point that after the parole period, you'll need to be sure the device is turned off - leaving it on forever *would* be invasion of privacy, unless your crime is such (eg. child molesting) that you are banned for life from entering certain areas such as school zones.
Grab.
Correct, it was fraud. Unless you have physically removed money from me without my permission or electronically transferred money directly out of my bank account without my permission, you have not stolen from me. Sure, you've defrauded me, so I may go round and torch your car and house, but theft and fraud are two different crimes. Even Enron was fraud, regardless of who lost how much. However strongly you feel about it, it doesn't change the legal situation.
Grab.
I've yet to find anyone who claims that VR is "knowledge Man should not know". AI maybe, but only in laughable films like the Matrix or the Terminator.
Computers are already capable of programming themselves - all we need to do is give them some human-readable text and they produce code. It's called a compiler. Auto-code generators from Matlab Simulink diagrams and similar are also here already. I should point out that I'm only being halfway facetious here, but you get the idea - what changes isn't the problem but the method you use to solve it.
I know what you mean though - a computer where you can tell it what to do in human terms and it does it. I know it's a long way ahead, but I'm pretty confident we won't live to see that. The problem is not so much CS and MHz as philosophy - no-one has much of a clue how to attack the problem. People are coming up with programs they claim "have the brain capacity of a grasshopper" or something like that, but all it amounts to is that they have something that's able to follow its preprogrammed instincts - those little photovore robots look fun but they're no great step forward. The problem is that awareness isn't something you can brute-force like chess.
I know someone's going to flame me: "How can you predict decades ahead? Look at all the predictions about computers!" Fair enough. However, also look at all the predictions about space travel a few decades ago, not least SDI. Some predictions are always wildly exceeded, and some predictions come to nothing. I've a feeling until we know more about what makes us aware, we don't have much of a hope in replicating that in silicon.
Grab.
Re your first point, that only happens if you publicly announce your intention to beat MS like a drum with your new software (viz Netscape). Whoops.
What MS will do is approach the company and its investors and say "I want to buy this company out for 10 times its market value". Sucks to have your work traded as a commodity, sure, but financially it's profitable for everyone.
On the OSS competition side, all that you need to do is spend more time on developing the product than the OSS guys do, and pay more attention to your customers. If you develop a product and then just let it stagnate for a couple of years (I'm thinking many niche-market apps like Select Yourdon, etc) then you're dead, and rightly so. But if you keep developing faster than the OSS guys (and let's face it, you'll have at least 2 years head-start) then you should be sorted. And even if the OSS guys eventually catch up, it's still not necessarily the end of the game - people can then decide whether they'd rather pay for the commercial version or get the free one. It's not uncommon (PartitionMagic, for instance) for the commercial one to succeed in spite of OSS competition.
Grab.
"...and it is illegal to ... use its data-files for ANY purpose not sanctioned"
Read that DMCA, and weep. Those day's are a-coming in the US. So far Europe's not submitted, but it's not looking good.
Grab.
Bone deterioration AFAIK is generally held to be a lack-of-gravity issue. Flight attendants on a 747 (and especially Concorde) don't suffer bone deterioration. Maybe there's issues with being further from the Earth that gives less protection, I'll grant you that, bcos we don't yet have anywhere outside the Earth with gravity to prove/disprove your theory.
Electricity to regrow amputated limbs? I believe not on humans. Some animals will regrow limbs anyway (eg. starfish) and I believe there is investigation into how to GM other animals into doing it.
Re your question about "any valid research", it's impossible to prove a negative - anyone who's ever taken an interest in research should know that. In fact EM fields are distorted by tissue (that's the principle behind an MRI scanner) so I could well imagine that there could be some effects at large doses. However MRI uses mindbogglingly large fields to produce any measurable effect. By analogy, hammering a nail into you is damaging, but your body is tolerant to (and in fact requires) a small amount of iron taken in food. Studies are still in progress on this, so you could well be proved right, but so far they've not found any significant link.
"Countless studies on how you can easily cure cancer"??? I suggest you talk to the doctors and to the cancer-research charities such as Macmillan in the UK, who are still desperately looking for how to do this. Surprisingly, they don't seem to have announced a breakthrough cure for all cancers...
Grab.
As far as "undetectable" goes, you need to know one very important thing about how MRI works. It generates MASSIVE magnetic fields (hence the first initial M for "magnetic").
How many people have something metal on them at this time? A belt buckle? Pocket change? Metal eyelets on your shoes? Surgical steel pins in your pelvis? An MRI will convert all of these into projectiles! So yes, it would be undetectable, provided you didn't notice your loose change exploding like a Claymore mine and blowing your legs off...
Many metals are immune to magnetic effects (copper for one), but iron is very strongly affected. And unfortunately for MRI-ing people, most of us have some steel somewhere in our clothing, so "undetectable MRI" is basically impossible.
Grab.
Except remove the porn, and that's exactly what "Harry Potter" and similar kids' books have done (Roald Dahl is another good one). Reading rates are way higher now than before amongst the HP target audience.
;-)
If reading is interesting, kids'll read. Blame that problem on kids being given "See Spot run" books to learn with instead of anything more interesting. If I'd learnt to read by seeing Spot run and Janet and John being fucking twee, I'd rather be illiterate too.
(BTW, don't tell me about Harry Potter porn. I really don't want to know about broomsticks, or wands, or what centaurs get up to of an evening. Or Janet and John and Spot, either.
It comes back to the same thing as this game-based stuff, anyway - let kids learn in a format they're happy with, rather than a format you're happy with.
Grab.
Excuse me?
(1) "Life-energy field"?! Bullshit - no such thing. Ditto (8), "vital energies".
Find a study that uses measurable scientific criteria.
Grab.
Too right.
"Hey, this guy who stole all our money is spending it on something cool for himself, so now he's a hero."
The wierd ironies of Slashdot postings. And to think tabloid newspapers get criticised for being fickle - they ain't got nothing on geek news...
Grab.
Depends. If the first one is anything to go by, anyone interested in good films should be.
The first film suffered from too much cutting. Jackson himself said that they had to make Frodo the focus of the first film, and cut anything that didn't really affect him. So other characters became flatter - only Aragorn got any depth at all. The special edition restored a whole lot of stuff that was cut which boosted the other characters from "also-rans" into a real ensemble piece.
The second film IMHO suffered even worse from this, because there *was* no "focus point". So you get stuff like Gimli becoming the comic relief and not much more. Hopefully the special edition will improve on this kind of thing in the same way that the first film did.
Also, of course, if you're at all interested in visual effects and how they're produced then the special edition which shows how some of the shots were made is essential viewing. This is definitely a side-issue though compared to getting a "better" version of the film.
Grab.
Suppose Mozilla had renamed their browser "emacs" or "vi". Would that get your attention?
Or is it only rude to do something like this to a more minor project which hasn't got the same publicity, and when you've got all AOL's dollars behind you?
Picking this name was not the problem. Picking this name *after* doing a name search and ignoring the pre-existing project, *and* copping a "fuck-you" attitude when asked to play nicely, now that's the problem...
Grab.
"They" being which side of the equation, the ones with the existing project, or the ones renaming their project to conflict?
Grab.
We currently use VSS version 6. Before that, we used version 5.
On version 5, SourceSafe would occasionally extract a random character or several from somewhere in a text file when you checked it in, and plonk that character at the end of the file. If you were lucky, the character(s) would be from some identifiable part of the code which would cause it to stop compiling, so you could trace the problem. If you were unlucky, the character(s) would be deleted from a comment and you wouldn't have a hope of finding it. If you were *real* unlucky, the character(s) would be deleted from code such that it still compiled (eg. 10u would become 1u) and then you were *really* screwed.
Occasionally it did it to binary files as well. This was particularly bad news for Word files, as they were then irretrievably corrupted.
On version 6, we've not had any loss of data yet. However we do have an interesting bug with labels, where when we label a file it says something about labels.ini being bad or some similar guff. The label succeeds, and ANALYSE shows no problems.
TortoiseCVS isn't a bad solution for day-to-day version control, although it sucks badly if you want to roll back to a previous version. WinCVS provides more control over CVS, but with a crummy user interface (par for the course with OSS, and to be fair it's not too much worse than SourceSafe).
Grab.
They *were* set, is the right way to put it.
For those who don't know, back 15 years ago when I started, they were all very dark. The basic concept in each scenario was that humanity and the various other races were being overwhelmed by the forces of Chaos (think demons and devils). But the state of humanity in each case made you unsure whether them winning would be a good thing - the WH Fantasy side made a big thing of the corruption of human society, and the 40K side made a big deal of the fact that the human Empire sacrificed psychic people to their god-emperor and all the various worlds were basically lapsing into barbarism.
Then GW changed their marketing, and targetted the game at 12-year-olds.
Suddenly all the new figures changed into WWF stereotypes, and all the art-work got the bright cartoony colours and heroic poses. Every race became a caricature - heroic humans, elegantly-dissipated elves, comic-turn orcs, etc. The game rules got over-simplified so that kiddies could understand them. And it all sucked, big-time.
Grab.
Simple. The miniatures are bloody expensive, and they market the hell out of the most expensive ones. I quit (well, I'd really quit much earlier, but I totally gave up on ever restarting) when I found they were trying to flog a £20 miniature, and that was 5 years back.
Bearing in mind that GW is exclusively marketed at young teens (15 would be the top-end age) then these prices are phenomenal. I presume only kids with rich daddies can do it now - I don't think I'd bother starting now, given the cost. There are other systems out there which would probably be better, it's just that GW are one of the bigger outlets (at least in Britain) so they get a bit of a lock-in.
Grab.
"In a galaxy far, far away..."? ;-)
What most people twig to is if someone else can, and has a good chance of using it to beat you to death with the result, you should learn how to do it too.
Re nanobots, check out The Diamond Age for a few nasty ideas (cookie cutters, torture bots that go straight for the nervous system, plagues of bots to attack specific racial groups, etc). You don't know nanotech, you can't engineer your own hunter-killer bots to neutralise the opposing ones. This would be a Bad Thing.
Grab.
Sure, it can ruin it. But that's just a negative attribute, saying that unless it's done reasonably well then it'll damage the experience. No-one ever bought a game bcos it had *really* *good* network code. ;-) Even with graphics, really good graphics won't actually do much to keep people playing (think of all those so-so FPSes).
What makes a game successful is the gameplay every time, not anything technical. The technical side just stops it being a failure. And in the entertainment industry with hordes of so-so films and games, wouldn't you like your game to be recognised as "good" rather simply "not totally bad"?
Grab.
The whitespace-only language is obviously a joke, but it's practical enough that you could (if you were perverse enough!) actually use it. More of an "oh-my-god-that's-so-wierd" than a genuine April Fool.
The "BSDs to be merged" story has to take first place though, simply for the following line:-
Of the two hundred eighty-nine casualties suffered by the UN troops at this time, the commanding officer insists that they were caused by a rampaging Canadian moose. Daniel Hartmeier, previously of the OpenBSD Project, insists that OpenBSD has no weapons of moose destruction.
Serious kudos to the guy who thought that one up!
Grab.
When you can pack your complete surround sound system into a laptop bag, give me a call...
Grab.
Would *you* bet the company on ESR's theories? Given that there has never, to date, been a successful open-source-based company? (Please don't quote IBM or HP, they make their money from hardware. Also please don't quote RH, I could make more profit from owning a newspaper stand than from investing in RH.)
Grab.