I too met Meretzsky, although this was at the Game Developers Conference in 2006 (or '05, I can't remember). He was talking to a Valve employee, and I had been drinking. I slurringly interrupted, and thanked him for inspiring me to become a games developer, then gushed about Planetfall and asked if he'd gotten my email to him about Splashdown, my IFComp entry that was a blatent Planetfall ripoff.
I learned three things from this encounter: 1) Don't talk to your idols when you're drunk. 2) People have generally heard enough about things they worked on two decades earlier, and don't want to hear about it anymore. 3) Steve is really, really tall.
Here in Seattle, there are many many tall condo type buildings going up. As we live on the coast, and next to a mountain range, there's a fair amount of wind most of the time, day and night. No, it's not as "100% On" as Nuclear would be, but it's an energy source and we should take advantage of it.
I'd love to see every tall building around with a few Vertical Axis Turbines on them, and I wouldn't mind a subsidy to put one in my backyard. The wife has already signed off on it, and I'm more than willing to strongarm, er, convince my neighbors to let us erect one.
When people's Android cellphones are reporting their every move via a network of wi-fi weather baloons, Google will have totally cornered the market of Paranoid Schitzophrenic consumers.
You have to supply your own child parts. Luckily, children are in vast abundance and are easily obtainable, often with little more than some inexpensive candy and a van.
You're missing the best part! We can build some pressure cookers into these cars to compress the released carbon into diamonds, and then we can win girls hearts, or sell them off at a profit to buy more gasoline! Even it we don't get diamonds out of it, maybe we can make graphite pencils and then drop a load off at the nearest school. Think of the Children! Sure, maybe the four-wheeled diamond manufacturers will drive nice companies like DeBeers out of business and destablize the paradise that is South Africa, and perhaps the pencil-making lobbies will shake their splintered fists at us, but this is innovation, man!
They named a book "Races & Classes"? If I were an outsider who didn't play AD&D in Jr. High School back in the day, I would seriously wonder about what exactly was in a book entitled "Races & Classes."
Clearly my logical side is shouting them out, but my two reactionary brain cells are screaming something in a knee-jerk fashion about encouraging divisiveness in our society.
Your girlfriend conjectured an idea out of nowhere? No, say it isn't so!
Obama is right on more issues than he's wrong on, he's demonstrated an ability to inspire and unify, and I personally believe that his "outsider" status and youth would be advantageous in setting this Nation down a better path.
Perhaps the OP could consider that not all robots are human killing machines, and this kind of swarming/flocking behavior could be applied to something like vehicular safety. I've often pondered the idea of lateral lines on fish, and how quickly a school of fish can become aware of the motions of surrounding fish and other obstacles, remaining in formation but moving as seemingly one unit. How great would it be if robotic cars could react thousands of times faster than a human, and in concert, to flow seamlessly around a tire blowout, or debris that fell off a truck onto the highway? Aren't these kinds of goals the very reason we do this kind of research, and isn't the application of this reserach to improve our quality of life the very thing that pushes mankind forward intellectually?
Sure, I played some game about a boulder rolling down a hill on a Commodore PET, and I played Pong on an Atari 2600, along with Gyruss, Asteroids, and Tempest at the arcade, pizza parlor and local supermarket, but the game I really remember as being intesely great was Dragon's Lair, the Laserdisc game. I first played this at an arcade in the mall in Central Islip, NY when I was nine or ten years old, and after plunking $1 into it for two games (because, you know, it cost an astonishing $0.50!!), I walked away with my knees shaking from excitement.
I remember thinking at the time that this was the future of games. Not the one choice per second, or the limits, but the sound, the pictures, and the immersion that Dragon's Lair offered. No longer was I simply pushing giant colored pixels around a screen, I was a real character, as real as any Saturday Morning Cartoon, on a real adventure facing off against fully realized environments and traps. Sure, they were the same every time, and there was very little "game" there. That didn't matter. It was the experience, the sheer emotional rush, that really got to me.
There were games I'd played before Dragon's Lair, but that was the first "game experience" that produced a real response, and it's something I'll never forget.
I suspect some of these views would be wildly unpopular, but here is what I would attempt to achieve while President, keeping in mind what the actual job of the President is. 1) Attempt to increase funding an manpower for Law Enforcement in an effort to decrease serious crime. This isn't turning the Nation into a police state, it's an attempt to ensure that every crime gets solved. The rationale here is that tougher sentences are not a crime deterrant because they simply build up the Prison Industry, but "rational criminals" still commit crimes because they think they can get away with them. Let's lower the possibility of getting away with serious crimes, which I believe will be a better deterrant. 2) Attempt to decriminalize smaller crimes, or crimes that can be argued as victimless. Prostitution and Marijuana posession come to mind. I'm sure there are many others. 3) Attempt to convince Legislators to draft bills, which I would sign, that require High School Students to take classes on Personal Finance, and that require students at three different grade levels (one Elementary level, one Jr. High level, one High School level) to take firearms safety courses, culminating at the highest level with an opt-in to actual hands on usage of firearms in a safe, supervised environment. On the first bill, I figure we need better education about finance and wealth management, and on the second, I figure if the Founding Fathers felt strongly enough to put firearm ownership in the Bill of Rights, we should teach our citizens how to be safe around them in an effort to reduce accidental deaths and increase responsibility. 4) Increase funding for science and technology research, and sign up the Nation for some Big Bets on the technological/scientific front. Maybe it's a better nuclear reactor, or a series of space or deep sea missions. Maybe it's the first "home AI". Something that we can get behind as a Nation and be proud of that will make us flex our intellectual muscle. 5) Pressure Congress to pass laws which tax organized religious groups which use the altar as a political bully pulpit, then send the AG after churches that meddle in politics. I believe in the seperation of Church and State, and this sword should cut both ways. 6) Pressure Congress to draft a budget that gets us back to a Progressive Taxation scheme, where the wealthy pay more and the poor pay less. Couple this with some programs that train the poor with valuable skills and useful money management techniques. The intention here is to create a constant transition stream of poor to wealthy (or at least Middle Class) that pays back the debt it owes to the State for the level of prosperity that they have achieved within the framework of our great Nation and our system of laws. 7) Seriously reevaluate our international financial aid, and come up with some good reasons why certain nations get Billions from the US. What are we getting in return? Build more hospitals and schools overseas and less bombs. Build up internaltional goodwill while undermining the appeal of radical anti-american forces in whatever way possible (and legal under International Law). I want less people to say "The Americans bombed our building!" and more people to say "The Americans built our great Hospital!" 8) Build safe, standardized Nuclear Power Plants all over the country. Reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and reduce the National Carbon Footprint. 9) Close Camp X-Ray. Process the prisoners there through some kind of transparent court system. Stop waterboarding. Comply with the Geneva Convention. 10) Pressure the entertainment business to offer more educational, world-view entertainment via popular media such as television. I want to see less narrow-view "'Merica, Fuck Yeah" crap on TV and more shows that encourage curiousity, acceptance of diversity, a culture of long term planning and dilligent improvment over a "get rich quick mentality", and intellectual honesty. Open people's minds to the notion that how we do things in one little town is
If you happen to know some people, or there are interesting industries locally, I totally agree. However, for the best cost/benefit ratio, you still can't beat some letters (on paper, sent via the mail).
Otherwise, yeah, people love to talk about themselves and their careers/interests. Be flattering and interested, and you'll get lots of interesting information back.
One of the best things I did was to shotgun a few letters to prospective employers telling them how highly I thought of their company, and asking what I should focus on if I wanted to be hired there. The vast majority of them sent me back a "we'll keep your resume on file" letters (when I had not in fact sent a resume, but it was still good to know how impersonal these companies were, and learn that I probably didn't want to work there), but one CG Effects company in particular wrote a three page letter back stressing certain coursework and areas of expertise that I should focus on. While I never wound up applying to that company due to other circumstance, it was very valuable to hear from industry professionals, and get an informed opinion.
I suspect this type of answer to your question would be much more valuable than a random smattering from the/. peanut gallery, although you probably wouldn't get to be amused by someone writing back that they're allergic to peanuts, and that I'm an insensitive clod.
Let's say I wanted to start up a company with, say, 20 employees, probably growing to three times that in a year. I know how to setup a LAN, what to purchase in PCs and peripherals, what office furniture to get, and even what legal hurdles I have to negotiate in order to get the business license and set up all the HR stuff.
What I don't know is how to set up a IP telephone system, from scratch. I've seen lots of stuff about IP Telephony in the office, and hear it is the great new thing, but every time I search on the web, all I see are lots of paragraphs talking about "solutions" and no "here's what you need: one of these boxes, these cables, these phones, this service plan."
Assuming I am not a LINUX DIY guy, and I don't want to hire someone specifically to manage telephony in addition to the normal business IT guy, where do I go for an off the shelf, or at least easily assembled, IP Telephony solution for my new company?
Yeah, I was going to say, when the robots start kicking back, then we have to worry.
Although, given Mankind's propensity to anthropomorphize everything, how long will it be until we reach the stage of seeing a robot being pushed around and having people respond with "poor robot!"?
I have a 720p DLP set, so I'd like to know the answer here as well. However, I do recall during my due dilligence research reading that the mirrors only flex through about 10 degrees of travel, and were tested through hundreds of thousands of flexes with no perceptable damage.
Slashdot Mirror
I too met Meretzsky, although this was at the Game Developers Conference in 2006 (or '05, I can't remember). He was talking to a Valve employee, and I had been drinking. I slurringly interrupted, and thanked him for inspiring me to become a games developer, then gushed about Planetfall and asked if he'd gotten my email to him about Splashdown, my IFComp entry that was a blatent Planetfall ripoff.
I learned three things from this encounter:
1) Don't talk to your idols when you're drunk.
2) People have generally heard enough about things they worked on two decades earlier, and don't want to hear about it anymore.
3) Steve is really, really tall.
Only if that funding is in direct competition with my own slut-related research.
Here in Seattle, there are many many tall condo type buildings going up. As we live on the coast, and next to a mountain range, there's a fair amount of wind most of the time, day and night. No, it's not as "100% On" as Nuclear would be, but it's an energy source and we should take advantage of it.
I'd love to see every tall building around with a few Vertical Axis Turbines on them, and I wouldn't mind a subsidy to put one in my backyard. The wife has already signed off on it, and I'm more than willing to strongarm, er, convince my neighbors to let us erect one.
Clearly you're not aware of the combined physics and genetic engineering research to develop a Railgun Vagina.
I'll drink to that!
Oh, wait...
When people's Android cellphones are reporting their every move via a network of wi-fi weather baloons, Google will have totally cornered the market of Paranoid Schitzophrenic consumers.
You have to supply your own child parts. Luckily, children are in vast abundance and are easily obtainable, often with little more than some inexpensive candy and a van.
You're missing the best part! We can build some pressure cookers into these cars to compress the released carbon into diamonds, and then we can win girls hearts, or sell them off at a profit to buy more gasoline! Even it we don't get diamonds out of it, maybe we can make graphite pencils and then drop a load off at the nearest school. Think of the Children! Sure, maybe the four-wheeled diamond manufacturers will drive nice companies like DeBeers out of business and destablize the paradise that is South Africa, and perhaps the pencil-making lobbies will shake their splintered fists at us, but this is innovation, man!
We had that, kinda. It was called Firefly.
We should all dump our cellphones in the nearest body of water?
That happens anyway every summer here in Seattle. We call it SeaFair.
Imagine six 9-11's on our [critical] infrastructure.
Wait, do you want me to imagine 5466, or -12?
If they can just get this thing down to zero volts, this chip will run forever!
They named a book "Races & Classes"? If I were an outsider who didn't play AD&D in Jr. High School back in the day, I would seriously wonder about what exactly was in a book entitled "Races & Classes."
Clearly my logical side is shouting them out, but my two reactionary brain cells are screaming something in a knee-jerk fashion about encouraging divisiveness in our society.
Your girlfriend conjectured an idea out of nowhere? No, say it isn't so!
Obama is right on more issues than he's wrong on, he's demonstrated an ability to inspire and unify, and I personally believe that his "outsider" status and youth would be advantageous in setting this Nation down a better path.
Yes, that is clearly EXACTLY what I was hoping for.
Now you've foiled my nefarious plan!
Perhaps the OP could consider that not all robots are human killing machines, and this kind of swarming/flocking behavior could be applied to something like vehicular safety. I've often pondered the idea of lateral lines on fish, and how quickly a school of fish can become aware of the motions of surrounding fish and other obstacles, remaining in formation but moving as seemingly one unit. How great would it be if robotic cars could react thousands of times faster than a human, and in concert, to flow seamlessly around a tire blowout, or debris that fell off a truck onto the highway? Aren't these kinds of goals the very reason we do this kind of research, and isn't the application of this reserach to improve our quality of life the very thing that pushes mankind forward intellectually?
I liked Cloverfield better, but at least the cinematography was on par.
Sure, I played some game about a boulder rolling down a hill on a Commodore PET, and I played Pong on an Atari 2600, along with Gyruss, Asteroids, and Tempest at the arcade, pizza parlor and local supermarket, but the game I really remember as being intesely great was Dragon's Lair, the Laserdisc game. I first played this at an arcade in the mall in Central Islip, NY when I was nine or ten years old, and after plunking $1 into it for two games (because, you know, it cost an astonishing $0.50!!), I walked away with my knees shaking from excitement.
I remember thinking at the time that this was the future of games. Not the one choice per second, or the limits, but the sound, the pictures, and the immersion that Dragon's Lair offered. No longer was I simply pushing giant colored pixels around a screen, I was a real character, as real as any Saturday Morning Cartoon, on a real adventure facing off against fully realized environments and traps. Sure, they were the same every time, and there was very little "game" there. That didn't matter. It was the experience, the sheer emotional rush, that really got to me.
There were games I'd played before Dragon's Lair, but that was the first "game experience" that produced a real response, and it's something I'll never forget.
I suspect some of these views would be wildly unpopular, but here is what I would attempt to achieve while President, keeping in mind what the actual job of the President is.
1) Attempt to increase funding an manpower for Law Enforcement in an effort to decrease serious crime. This isn't turning the Nation into a police state, it's an attempt to ensure that every crime gets solved. The rationale here is that tougher sentences are not a crime deterrant because they simply build up the Prison Industry, but "rational criminals" still commit crimes because they think they can get away with them. Let's lower the possibility of getting away with serious crimes, which I believe will be a better deterrant.
2) Attempt to decriminalize smaller crimes, or crimes that can be argued as victimless. Prostitution and Marijuana posession come to mind. I'm sure there are many others.
3) Attempt to convince Legislators to draft bills, which I would sign, that require High School Students to take classes on Personal Finance, and that require students at three different grade levels (one Elementary level, one Jr. High level, one High School level) to take firearms safety courses, culminating at the highest level with an opt-in to actual hands on usage of firearms in a safe, supervised environment. On the first bill, I figure we need better education about finance and wealth management, and on the second, I figure if the Founding Fathers felt strongly enough to put firearm ownership in the Bill of Rights, we should teach our citizens how to be safe around them in an effort to reduce accidental deaths and increase responsibility.
4) Increase funding for science and technology research, and sign up the Nation for some Big Bets on the technological/scientific front. Maybe it's a better nuclear reactor, or a series of space or deep sea missions. Maybe it's the first "home AI". Something that we can get behind as a Nation and be proud of that will make us flex our intellectual muscle.
5) Pressure Congress to pass laws which tax organized religious groups which use the altar as a political bully pulpit, then send the AG after churches that meddle in politics. I believe in the seperation of Church and State, and this sword should cut both ways.
6) Pressure Congress to draft a budget that gets us back to a Progressive Taxation scheme, where the wealthy pay more and the poor pay less. Couple this with some programs that train the poor with valuable skills and useful money management techniques. The intention here is to create a constant transition stream of poor to wealthy (or at least Middle Class) that pays back the debt it owes to the State for the level of prosperity that they have achieved within the framework of our great Nation and our system of laws.
7) Seriously reevaluate our international financial aid, and come up with some good reasons why certain nations get Billions from the US. What are we getting in return? Build more hospitals and schools overseas and less bombs. Build up internaltional goodwill while undermining the appeal of radical anti-american forces in whatever way possible (and legal under International Law). I want less people to say "The Americans bombed our building!" and more people to say "The Americans built our great Hospital!"
8) Build safe, standardized Nuclear Power Plants all over the country. Reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and reduce the National Carbon Footprint.
9) Close Camp X-Ray. Process the prisoners there through some kind of transparent court system. Stop waterboarding. Comply with the Geneva Convention.
10) Pressure the entertainment business to offer more educational, world-view entertainment via popular media such as television. I want to see less narrow-view "'Merica, Fuck Yeah" crap on TV and more shows that encourage curiousity, acceptance of diversity, a culture of long term planning and dilligent improvment over a "get rich quick mentality", and intellectual honesty. Open people's minds to the notion that how we do things in one little town is
If you happen to know some people, or there are interesting industries locally, I totally agree. However, for the best cost/benefit ratio, you still can't beat some letters (on paper, sent via the mail).
Otherwise, yeah, people love to talk about themselves and their careers/interests. Be flattering and interested, and you'll get lots of interesting information back.
Agreed.
/. peanut gallery, although you probably wouldn't get to be amused by someone writing back that they're allergic to peanuts, and that I'm an insensitive clod.
One of the best things I did was to shotgun a few letters to prospective employers telling them how highly I thought of their company, and asking what I should focus on if I wanted to be hired there. The vast majority of them sent me back a "we'll keep your resume on file" letters (when I had not in fact sent a resume, but it was still good to know how impersonal these companies were, and learn that I probably didn't want to work there), but one CG Effects company in particular wrote a three page letter back stressing certain coursework and areas of expertise that I should focus on. While I never wound up applying to that company due to other circumstance, it was very valuable to hear from industry professionals, and get an informed opinion.
I suspect this type of answer to your question would be much more valuable than a random smattering from the
Good luck!
So what you're saying is that I should invest in this vaccine and invest in a meth lab.
Let's say I wanted to start up a company with, say, 20 employees, probably growing to three times that in a year. I know how to setup a LAN, what to purchase in PCs and peripherals, what office furniture to get, and even what legal hurdles I have to negotiate in order to get the business license and set up all the HR stuff.
What I don't know is how to set up a IP telephone system, from scratch. I've seen lots of stuff about IP Telephony in the office, and hear it is the great new thing, but every time I search on the web, all I see are lots of paragraphs talking about "solutions" and no "here's what you need: one of these boxes, these cables, these phones, this service plan."
Assuming I am not a LINUX DIY guy, and I don't want to hire someone specifically to manage telephony in addition to the normal business IT guy, where do I go for an off the shelf, or at least easily assembled, IP Telephony solution for my new company?
Yeah, I was going to say, when the robots start kicking back, then we have to worry.
Although, given Mankind's propensity to anthropomorphize everything, how long will it be until we reach the stage of seeing a robot being pushed around and having people respond with "poor robot!"?
I have a 720p DLP set, so I'd like to know the answer here as well. However, I do recall during my due dilligence research reading that the mirrors only flex through about 10 degrees of travel, and were tested through hundreds of thousands of flexes with no perceptable damage.