Funny, I don't recall Masquerade having a story being told over dozens of websites, and over the radio, newspapers, IM, email, skywriting and live events featuring hundreds of players. Masquerade didn't have dozens of players writing a book together to advance the story, or thousands participating in a distributed computing initiative. I guess we must be thinking of different games.
[Disclaimer: I am the lead designer of Perplex City]
Is scaring players the objective of alternate reality games? Do players really want to blur the line between game and reality? Many people used to complain about Majestic because they *didn't* want to receive phone calls in the middle of the night, and more current games like Regenesis cater for that fact by allowing you to choose the level of your immersion.
I enjoy games where players feel they have a role in the game as well. That's what we try to do in Perplex City, by giving players the chance to truly contribute in what's happening. But when you have tens or hundreds of thousands of players, you have to make a choice about where you want the game and story to go, since not all of the players will agree on a direction. It won't be possible to give all players a game-changing or story-changing role, and I think that's something that a lot of people do not realise.
[Disclaimer: I am the lead designer of Perplex City]
What makes Perplex City more than geocaching with a prize? How about the story that's being told over dozens of websites, in real time, to tens of thousands of people? How about the live events that have featured hundreds of players across the world, where they've chased spies in black helicopters and watched messages being flashed across the Thames from the London Eye? How about the distributed computing initiative that's seen over a thousand people trying to crack an encrypted puzzle?
[Disclaimer: I am the lead designer of Perplex City]
I've read it from the Mars Society's Desert Research Station, located in the Utah desert. It's not Mars, but it might as well have been since we had to wear spacesuit-analogues when going outside...
The person writing the specs is either incompetent or insane. For 400GB of storage, they quote:
"45 hours of HDTV broadcast, or 4,000 high-resolution x-rays, or 40,000 typical library books, or 10,000 high-quality, 4 minute MP3 recordings"
Wow... I never knew that a typical library book took up 10MB (more like 100k). What are they doing, scanning all the pages in? And what kind of bitrate are they using for a 4 minute MP3 recording to take up 40MB?
This is a typical Microsoft-bashing Register article, written by someone who hasn't even tried the phone. I have. I like it a lot - the phone can do full Internet browsing, and also has MSN Messenger. Synchronisation with Outlook has been perfect, and I nor any other users I've talked to have had any problems whatsoever with dialling or receiving messages.
Of course you can't see everything on a web page, the screen is only 176x220 resolution; but if you visit pages optimised for mobile devices (and there are a lot of them) then there's no problem.
The phone hasn't crashed for me yet. I've had it for two weeks and use it quite a lot. I guess YMMV, but others I've talked to have had similar crash-free experiences. It crashes about as much as any other new unpatched phone, such as the T68m (which you'll remember received a whole load of bugfixes before it worked well).
I had no problems in using the camera - I don't know what this 'ten presses to take a picture' nonsense is. Plus, the camera quality is significantly better or at least as good as any other mobile camera out now; a simple comparison of photos, e.g. SPV vs. GX-10 will show this. And sheesh, it's only supposed to be a mobile camera, not a professional one!
As for lag, yes, there is some. Certainly not '30 second lag times', I don't think I've ever had any more than 5 second lag. Most of the time it is on the scale of 1-2 seconds.
There's a lot of talk about, 'Oh, I'll just wait until the Sony Ericsson P800 comes out'. Well, you can wait if you like, it's only been delayed for several months now. Plus, the P800 will cost at least £200 more than the SPV, so what use is there in comparing two products whose prices differ so greatly? (The SPV costs from free - with contract - to £100 for upgrade).
Instead of basing your opinion on a single review, I suggest that you check out this forum about the Smartphone: http://modaco.com/smartphone/viewforum.php?f=2. The reports aren't all positive, by any means. The phone seems to provoke a love-hate relationship, but there are a lot of people who love the phone. Compared to my old Sony J70 phone, the SPV is incredibly better and lightyears ahead of my old Visor Deluxe PDA.
Re:The problem with Majestic..
on
Goodbye, "Majestic"
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I forgot to mention this in my previous reply. Essentially, the fact that Majestic was linear had absolutely bugger all to do with its demise.
Why? Two reasons.
1. How are you going to make it fully interactive, exactly? The game is several months long, has FMV, phone calls, AI bots, intricately made puzzles and hundreds of pages of content. Even three or four branch points would increase the workload intolerably, and if you call that interactivity, I'll eat my hat. Most of the A.I. game content was created before the start of the game, and I suspect this was the same for Majestic.
In any case, would the game be interactive for each player, or for the entire community? For full, convincing interactivity (not that cheapo Dragon's Lair type stuff), doing it per-player is impossible, again due to workload. Doing it for the community is slightly easier but then you run into the problem of trying to get the community to make a single decision.
2. In the case of Majestic and the A.I. game, linearity is to be desired. Basically, it's far easier to write a decent story (and that is the *central* requirement of all these games) if you don't have to keep on changing it all the time according to someone else's whims. The A.I. game, contrary to popular opinion, did not allow its players to affect the storyline in any significant manner and it came out perfectly fine.
Re:The problem with Majestic..
on
Goodbye, "Majestic"
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
There are many reasons why Majestic didn't succeed, and most of them aren't those that are listed above. I wrote an in-depth analysis of Majestic here, contained within a report examining all of the aspects concerning the Microsoft A.I. game. I correctly predicted that EA would have a hard if not impossible time of attracting and retaining the 100,000+ subscribers required to recoup their $10 million investment.
Briefly, Majestic attempted far too much with far too little. It didn't have an engrossing storyline, unlike that of the universally acclaimed Microsoft A.I. game, it didn't have enough content and it overly restricted the activities of players via its cumbersome 'episodes'.
There was little to no direct interaction with real human people and interaction with AI bots was painfully obvious and crude. Due to a focus on a more individual-based game, teamwork and thus the online community was kept rather small, as opposed to the fanatic-like community of the Microsoft game.
But I'm being far too harsh here. As I said in my analysis, most players actually enjoyed the game. Unfortunately, the game wasn't known to that many people, it cost $10/month and it was restricted to North America. Additionally, its demographic was sorely restricted to the 18-35 male player range.
The A.I. game had, supposedly, around two million players. While I loved the A.I. game and was one of the most active players (just check out my Guide if you don't believe me) I honestly don't think it had two million players. That number really means two million unique page views on the game sites. Not that this really matters - the game produced an ungodly amount of publicity, far beyond that of Majestic, and received awards from Entertainment Weekly and the New York Times, among others.
I believe a central problem of any game of this type is that for $10/month, you really expect to get constant interaction and stimulation from your game. In games such as Everquest and so on, you can easily play constantly and not get too bored. In these developer-content driven games such as Majestic, there is only so much you can read and only so many puzzles you can solve. You can't play them all the time.
So you have to have a substitute. In the Microsoft A.I. game, that substitute was the Cloudmakers community that formed around the game and spent 24 hours a day speculating about the storyline and hard-as-nails puzzles. I suspect that in future games, user-created content will serve as a substitute, along with more diverse content and puzzles (e.g. real life treasure hunts, role playing, etc etc).
I've written a very comprehensive guide to the entire game so far which, I'm told, is very good for beginners. It's quite long (40,000 words) since it covers every website and puzzle but it's a good read and I can promise you that the story of the game will get you hooked. I've also written a couple of editorials.
Why has this been given a troll rating? I find it disappointing when people mod down posts just because they don't agree with their point of view.
Personally, I'm a very active advocate of space exploration and I don't agree with all the points he is saying - but that's subjective. This guy hasn't said anything blatantly false, he hasn't offended anyone and he makes his case well.
For the record, I think that Canada could have done a lot worse than develop the Canadarm, which actually does something useful. And I think that space exploration always seems to take the rap for spending money 'that could be used for better things like medical research, reducing poverty, etc etc', since the argument never seems to extend to other areas of science or indeed some of our own wasteful practices. In other words, it's always someone else's fault that the world is the way it is (or another city, another political party or another country).
That's not the point. The fact that cell jammers are outlawed has made them impossibly difficult to get - in fact, I have not heard a single thing, *ever*, about someone possessing a cell jammer in the UK.
This is not the old argument about how criminals don't care that they're not allowed to own guns or somesuch similar statement. They're outlawed, which means that no manufacturer wants to make them, which means you can't buy them.
What are you talking about? If anything, moving to fully CSS compliant browsers (and thus using fully CSS-ed pages) would be beneficial for the handicapped. CSS pages are much easier to convert to plain text and they don't suffer all the junk mark-up that we see with HTML.
"Ibiblio is a diverse and expansive collection of information on the Internet, created and maintained by the public, for the public. It is the ultimate collection of freely available information, the future of Internet librarianship, and a collaboration between the former MetaLab.unc.edu (formerly known as SunSITE.unc.edu) and the Red Hat Center for Development."
Along with a huge Linux FTP archive, it hosts a few hundred 'collections' of information off the web.
Disclaimer: I'm not entirely impartial here because I'm currently moving my website, Astrobiology: The Living Universe, to the Ibiblio servers. At the moment we're still setting it up at its new home (www.ibiblio.org/astrobiology) and implementing a new interface. The working version is at http://library.thinkquest.org/C003763.
The point is that while the presence of liquid water doesn't necessarily mean there's life, as far as we know, if you want life, you need water (1).
Why is water so important? It's an excellent solvent for which reactions can take place in, it has plenty of unique properties and it is also involved in many biochemical reactions itself.
So the presence of water is a strong indication that life *might* be on water-holding planets.
So what? Many people don't care if there's life out there. The fact is, if we discovered life on Mars, Ganymede and Europa, then it's pretty much a dead cert that life is *everywhere* in the universe. If that implication doesn't bother you, I don't think I know what does.
(1) I said 'As far as we know', because while it's true that most experts agree that water is necessary for life, not all of them do.
It's universally agreed that water is required for our kind of life, i.e. cellular based life, but what about other types of life that you see depicted in some of the more realistic SF novels? Those hydrogen gas-bags in Clarke's 2001 series aren't completely implausible.
I recently interviewed Dr. Jack Cohen from Warwick University about the plausibility of extra-terrestrial life, including whether water was a prequisite for my site Astrobiology: The Living Universe. You can read the interview here.
Don't be ridiculous. Not only have you failed to cite sources for your ideas, but you believe that there was some kind of conspiracy behind this. NASA would have wanted nothing better than to find conclusive proof of life on Mars. Do you even realise that the mission of the Viking landers was to find life?
The decision that there was no conclusive evidence of life was the correct and brave decision NASA should have made. It would have been only too easy for them to label inconclusive results as positive.
I have the National Geographic: Mars book in front of me now, written between the chief scientific correspondent of AP News and the Mars Pathfinder Project Scientist. I quote:
"There was no money left for testing [of the biological experiments on Viking]... they would have no time to learn how to use them. Some earlier testing had been conducted, but it had been mostly disastrous."
In addition, none of the experiments were positive for life - two of them could be invalidated due to the fact that, unexpectedly, hydrogen peroxide had been found on the surface (basically screwing up the results and mimicing the behaviour of bacteria). They never expected to find hydrogen peroxide and they never tested for it. No wonder they changed the standards for the tests - it would be criminal to do otherwise. The last experiment, the GCMS (Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer), which was supposed to detect the presence of organic chemicals, found none whatsoever.
Am I biased against space exploration and life on Mars? Certainly not - I'm the chair of youth outreach for the Mars Society. However, I know how to draw a line between being blindly optimistic and following the scientific method of accepting the most plausible and supported answer.
Want to know more about the experiments carried on board Viking? Visit here.
In that case, we agree. The goal of NASA, and of the Mars Society, is to see a self-sustaining colony on Mars. The entire point is that they'll be able to extract oxygen from water and mine it from Mars' atmosphere, they'll be able to take water from permafrost and they'll be able to synthesise rocket fuel from the CO2 in the atmosphere. They'll also try to use Martian materials (esp. magnesium) to create 'native' construction materials, and grow their own food there.
There was also an interesting article in New Scientist about how robots can be used to automatically lay down dozens of square kilometers of solar panels on the Moon or Mars.
No-one wants a 'flag-and-footprints' Mars mission - not NASA, not the public, and not the US government. If we go to Mars, the *minimum* stay will be 18 months, and during that time you can get a lot out of your money in scientific research. We're talking real, ground-breaking planetary geology and biology here, not the dubious science that is set to be conducted on the ISS.
You'll find that private industry is doing quite well - SpaceDev is planning several asteroid prospecting missions and it's almost every week that you hear something new about MirCorp, or Roton, or some other commercial space company. People might scoff at MirCorp's efforts, but they are the first real new development in the commercial use of space (by that, I exclude telecoms and Earth science satellites) for decades. Space tourism is going to be a big thing.
Do you really believe that? The public, especially the American public, is remarkably fickle about matters like this. Given a large publicity budget and the support of the next President, NASA would have absolutely no problem in selling a manned Mars expedition to the country. They'd say it wouldn't cost a lot - NASA wouldn't be likely to need much increase in their overall annual budget.
They'd say it would show America's pioneering spirit, and I think that would touch a nerve with voters. They'd say that it would look for life - and believe it or not, very many people find that interesting.
The responsibility of NASA now is to test, research and develop hardware so that the cost of commercial space utilisation can be brought down. Going to Mars will test out new hardware - I can imagine that exactly how the crews cope for the months long journey will be of interest to any companies considering asteroid mining.
If we ever want to go into space - if humans want to go into space - then sooner or later, money will have to be spent on developing and researching ways to do it. And at first, it will be hugely unprofitable. But NASA, through their R&D, are helping other companies to bring their prices down.
I'm not quite sure I understand your point here. You believe in unmanned space exploration, yet you advocate mining space, terraformation and zero-G manufacturing. All of those will require humans in space. What is that, but space exploration? How can space exploration possible not help that goal?
I think it might do you good to consider your arguments before you post. I would think that the Discovery Channel employs trained scientists as consultants, who most probably do know more than you about this.
Mars and Devon Island (not Canada) are as alike as you can get. Contrary to popular belief, temperatures on Mars are not that low - the average surface temperature is minus 23 centigrade. Devon Island has geological features that are analagous to what might be found on Mars, and it also has fossils and microbes in the vicinity. As such, it's an excellent place to field test any hardware or survey techniques that might be used by manned or unmanned searches for life on Mars.
The Flashline MARS is supposed to serve two purposes; one, it's supposed to allow scientists to have a greater understanding of what would be involved in sending humans to Mars with respect to growing food, conducting expeditions and also social dynamics of the crew. Two, the MARS is also here to drum up public interest in space exploration.
I think the main problem with this line of reasoning is that people fail to realise the number of discoveries that could not have been made without humans in space. Put it this way - everything ever done on Mir, Spacelab or the Space Shuttle would not have been possible without humans. That includes countless biological experiments that needed constant, *intelligent* monitoring and also other observations.
The fact is - if we ever want to go into space as a civilization, there is no getting around the fact that someday we'll have to send some humans up there. And at first, it'll be expensive and they won't be able to do much. But it'll give us the necessary experience to develop more efficient human presences in space.
That is, of course, if you believe in the idea of humans in space.
The Internet's most significant change in the future will be making all forms of communication completely transparent. I'm not talking about privacy issues here, I'm talking about making the process of talking to someone as easy as possible.
With the new giga and tera (and probably exa) byte fibreoptics being laid, it'll be possible to send detailed, real-time 3D holographic data across the Internet. Of course, you'll need technology that will be able to gather this data - probably not any of the traditional laser depth scanners, but more elegant solutions such as sensors woven into the fabric of clothing and perhaps cameras on glasses that will pick up facial expressions.
Then, you'll either need:
a) a good retinal laser projector
or, preferably,
b) a good portable holographic projector
OK - so what is this all for? Having this would mean that you could simply call someone up by saying their name, and they, to all intents and purposes, would appear right alongside you. No typing at computers, no using mobile or videophones - the person you're talking to *will* be there, apart from the fact that you can't touch them (tactile bodysuits apart).
So what? I hear you ask. This is all old VR bullshit, tell us something we don't know.
OK. VR isn't real life. There will be people who won't like going into VR, and besides, you can't walk around the 'real world' while plugged into VR without walking into things.
So if you want to meet with someone in a practical sense while being able to walk around and look like a normal individual, you'll need the person you're talking to to be 'present' in the real world. Barring teleportation technology, holographic projectors are the next best thing.
Imagine it - you have a small holographic projector on your shoulder, and biometric pickups on your clothes. You'll be able to walk around the town or city talking to this person without people giving you funny looks. In fact, it'll be just as if they were there in real life.
It works both ways - the person you're talking to could be walking along the beach or driving in a car - yet you'd both have the illusion of their presence.
This is more of a big deal than you can possibly imagine.
1) Sigh. Of course launch costs are going to come down. And have you ever considered the possibility of actually *using* the raw materials on the asteroid to produce crude cargo pods in situ? I'd remind you of the recent work done on the inflatable parachute/spacecraft, which essentially means you can *throw* something back down to Earth.
If you launch mining apparatus up to an asteroid, that would negate the need for constant 'shuttle' launches.
2) "Noone needs helium 3 or dumb crap like that unless they're looking to offset the mass-expense of earth by making fuel/stuff on the fly." I need not tell you that this sentence doesn't make any sense.
The entire *point* of asteroid mining is that the cost for mining and delivering the materials to Earth or Earth orbit is *cheaper* than what it is now. Do you really think NASA and SpaceDev would even bother researching this if they thought they couldn't make it cheaper? Come on.
3) Would you care to cite some academic papers on this subject? Most asteroids are fluff or crap, and have nowhere to land? Why not tell NASDA or SpaceDev this stunning piece of insight, so they won't have to waste their money on trying to land on an asteroid and mine it.
Of course we know that asteroids have useful materials. We can analyse their composition via careful inspection of wavelengths of light from the asteroid, and we can approximate their mass and density from their motion. Don't make statements you can't back up.
4) Carbonaceous chondrites (I don't suppose you'd know what they are? No) are full of organic materials, water and 'other stuff like that'. Plenty of material to burn for energy. Take up a small nuclear generator or some solar panels, and you're away. There are ideas for using mirrors and solar panels to concentrate solar energy into a single spot for smelting.
5) Outer space settlements are not a solution for overpopulation. But I'm sure people from those crank organisations like NASA, ESA, the Planetary Society and the Mars Society would have words with your claim that 100k will never live off Earth in the next century. 'Apparently' these organisations have people called scientists in them.
6) Why bother going to America? We've got plenty of space where we are in Europe, and it's too difficult to sail across the Atlantic. In fact, why bother coming down from the trees in the first place? It's so much of a bother.
7) Like what? Would you like telling that statement to NASA and Russian astronauts, that they're just Stupid Human Tricks?
8) Yes, it is a valid method of discussion to use arguments without substantiating them. Please go to www.marssociety.org if you want some informed opinion on why we should go to Mars.
9) How on Earth did this get message moderated up to 2?
People forget that we already have clones in the real world - they're called identical twins. And you'll have noticed that identical twins are far from identical in behaviour, so if you clone yourself, chances are that s/he won't be that much like you. Your clone will be brought up in a different environment, with different parents, in a different technological age.
I fail to see why on Earth you'd want to clone yourself, because it's damn well not going to be your soul-mate or any other guff like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, I don't recall Masquerade having a story being told over dozens of websites, and over the radio, newspapers, IM, email, skywriting and live events featuring hundreds of players. Masquerade didn't have dozens of players writing a book together to advance the story, or thousands participating in a distributed computing initiative. I guess we must be thinking of different games.
[Disclaimer: I am the lead designer of Perplex City]
Is scaring players the objective of alternate reality games? Do players really want to blur the line between game and reality? Many people used to complain about Majestic because they *didn't* want to receive phone calls in the middle of the night, and more current games like Regenesis cater for that fact by allowing you to choose the level of your immersion.
I enjoy games where players feel they have a role in the game as well. That's what we try to do in Perplex City, by giving players the chance to truly contribute in what's happening. But when you have tens or hundreds of thousands of players, you have to make a choice about where you want the game and story to go, since not all of the players will agree on a direction. It won't be possible to give all players a game-changing or story-changing role, and I think that's something that a lot of people do not realise.
[Disclaimer: I am the lead designer of Perplex City]
What makes Perplex City more than geocaching with a prize? How about the story that's being told over dozens of websites, in real time, to tens of thousands of people? How about the live events that have featured hundreds of players across the world, where they've chased spies in black helicopters and watched messages being flashed across the Thames from the London Eye? How about the distributed computing initiative that's seen over a thousand people trying to crack an encrypted puzzle?
[Disclaimer: I am the lead designer of Perplex City]
I've read it from the Mars Society's Desert Research Station, located in the Utah desert. It's not Mars, but it might as well have been since we had to wear spacesuit-analogues when going outside...
The person writing the specs is either incompetent or insane. For 400GB of storage, they quote:
"45 hours of HDTV broadcast, or
4,000 high-resolution x-rays, or
40,000 typical library books, or
10,000 high-quality, 4 minute MP3 recordings"
Wow... I never knew that a typical library book took up 10MB (more like 100k). What are they doing, scanning all the pages in? And what kind of bitrate are they using for a 4 minute MP3 recording to take up 40MB?
This is a typical Microsoft-bashing Register article, written by someone who hasn't even tried the phone. I have. I like it a lot - the phone can do full Internet browsing, and also has MSN Messenger. Synchronisation with Outlook has been perfect, and I nor any other users I've talked to have had any problems whatsoever with dialling or receiving messages.
Of course you can't see everything on a web page, the screen is only 176x220 resolution; but if you visit pages optimised for mobile devices (and there are a lot of them) then there's no problem.
The phone hasn't crashed for me yet. I've had it for two weeks and use it quite a lot. I guess YMMV, but others I've talked to have had similar crash-free experiences. It crashes about as much as any other new unpatched phone, such as the T68m (which you'll remember received a whole load of bugfixes before it worked well).
I had no problems in using the camera - I don't know what this 'ten presses to take a picture' nonsense is. Plus, the camera quality is significantly better or at least as good as any other mobile camera out now; a simple comparison of photos, e.g. SPV vs. GX-10 will show this. And sheesh, it's only supposed to be a mobile camera, not a professional one!
As for lag, yes, there is some. Certainly not '30 second lag times', I don't think I've ever had any more than 5 second lag. Most of the time it is on the scale of 1-2 seconds.
There's a lot of talk about, 'Oh, I'll just wait until the Sony Ericsson P800 comes out'. Well, you can wait if you like, it's only been delayed for several months now. Plus, the P800 will cost at least £200 more than the SPV, so what use is there in comparing two products whose prices differ so greatly? (The SPV costs from free - with contract - to £100 for upgrade).
Instead of basing your opinion on a single review, I suggest that you check out this forum about the Smartphone: http://modaco.com/smartphone/viewforum.php?f=2. The reports aren't all positive, by any means. The phone seems to provoke a love-hate relationship, but there are a lot of people who love the phone. Compared to my old Sony J70 phone, the SPV is incredibly better and lightyears ahead of my old Visor Deluxe PDA.
I forgot to mention this in my previous reply. Essentially, the fact that Majestic was linear had absolutely bugger all to do with its demise.
Why? Two reasons.
1. How are you going to make it fully interactive, exactly? The game is several months long, has FMV, phone calls, AI bots, intricately made puzzles and hundreds of pages of content. Even three or four branch points would increase the workload intolerably, and if you call that interactivity, I'll eat my hat. Most of the A.I. game content was created before the start of the game, and I suspect this was the same for Majestic.
In any case, would the game be interactive for each player, or for the entire community? For full, convincing interactivity (not that cheapo Dragon's Lair type stuff), doing it per-player is impossible, again due to workload. Doing it for the community is slightly easier but then you run into the problem of trying to get the community to make a single decision.
2. In the case of Majestic and the A.I. game, linearity is to be desired. Basically, it's far easier to write a decent story (and that is the *central* requirement of all these games) if you don't have to keep on changing it all the time according to someone else's whims. The A.I. game, contrary to popular opinion, did not allow its players to affect the storyline in any significant manner and it came out perfectly fine.
Briefly, Majestic attempted far too much with far too little. It didn't have an engrossing storyline, unlike that of the universally acclaimed Microsoft A.I. game, it didn't have enough content and it overly restricted the activities of players via its cumbersome 'episodes'.
There was little to no direct interaction with real human people and interaction with AI bots was painfully obvious and crude. Due to a focus on a more individual-based game, teamwork and thus the online community was kept rather small, as opposed to the fanatic-like community of the Microsoft game.
But I'm being far too harsh here. As I said in my analysis, most players actually enjoyed the game. Unfortunately, the game wasn't known to that many people, it cost $10/month and it was restricted to North America. Additionally, its demographic was sorely restricted to the 18-35 male player range.
The A.I. game had, supposedly, around two million players. While I loved the A.I. game and was one of the most active players (just check out my Guide if you don't believe me) I honestly don't think it had two million players. That number really means two million unique page views on the game sites. Not that this really matters - the game produced an ungodly amount of publicity, far beyond that of Majestic, and received awards from Entertainment Weekly and the New York Times, among others.
I believe a central problem of any game of this type is that for $10/month, you really expect to get constant interaction and stimulation from your game. In games such as Everquest and so on, you can easily play constantly and not get too bored. In these developer-content driven games such as Majestic, there is only so much you can read and only so many puzzles you can solve. You can't play them all the time.
So you have to have a substitute. In the Microsoft A.I. game, that substitute was the Cloudmakers community that formed around the game and spent 24 hours a day speculating about the storyline and hard-as-nails puzzles. I suspect that in future games, user-created content will serve as a substitute, along with more diverse content and puzzles (e.g. real life treasure hunts, role playing, etc etc).
[begin self-plug]
I've written a very comprehensive guide to the entire game so far which, I'm told, is very good for beginners. It's quite long (40,000 words) since it covers every website and puzzle but it's a good read and I can promise you that the story of the game will get you hooked. I've also written a couple of editorials.
[end self-plug]
Why has this been given a troll rating? I find it disappointing when people mod down posts just because they don't agree with their point of view.
Personally, I'm a very active advocate of space exploration and I don't agree with all the points he is saying - but that's subjective. This guy hasn't said anything blatantly false, he hasn't offended anyone and he makes his case well.
For the record, I think that Canada could have done a lot worse than develop the Canadarm, which actually does something useful. And I think that space exploration always seems to take the rap for spending money 'that could be used for better things like medical research, reducing poverty, etc etc', since the argument never seems to extend to other areas of science or indeed some of our own wasteful practices. In other words, it's always someone else's fault that the world is the way it is (or another city, another political party or another country).
That's not the point. The fact that cell jammers are outlawed has made them impossibly difficult to get - in fact, I have not heard a single thing, *ever*, about someone possessing a cell jammer in the UK.
This is not the old argument about how criminals don't care that they're not allowed to own guns or somesuch similar statement. They're outlawed, which means that no manufacturer wants to make them, which means you can't buy them.
Excuse me, but cellphone jammers already are outlawed in the UK.
What are you talking about? If anything, moving to fully CSS compliant browsers (and thus using fully CSS-ed pages) would be beneficial for the handicapped. CSS pages are much easier to convert to plain text and they don't suffer all the junk mark-up that we see with HTML.
I would also direct you to the relevant section in the Educational FAQ of the WSP about how uptake of web standards will increase accessibility to all.
A good archive on the web is Ibiblio:
"Ibiblio is a diverse and expansive collection of information on the Internet, created and maintained by the public, for the public. It is the ultimate collection of freely available information, the future of Internet librarianship, and a collaboration between the former MetaLab.unc.edu (formerly known as SunSITE.unc.edu) and the Red Hat Center for Development."
Along with a huge Linux FTP archive, it hosts a few hundred 'collections' of information off the web.
Disclaimer: I'm not entirely impartial here because I'm currently moving my website, Astrobiology: The Living Universe, to the Ibiblio servers. At the moment we're still setting it up at its new home (www.ibiblio.org/astrobiology) and implementing a new interface. The working version is at http://library.thinkquest.org/C003763.
Why is water so important? It's an excellent solvent for which reactions can take place in, it has plenty of unique properties and it is also involved in many biochemical reactions itself.
So the presence of water is a strong indication that life *might* be on water-holding planets.
So what? Many people don't care if there's life out there. The fact is, if we discovered life on Mars, Ganymede and Europa, then it's pretty much a dead cert that life is *everywhere* in the universe. If that implication doesn't bother you, I don't think I know what does.
(1) I said 'As far as we know', because while it's true that most experts agree that water is necessary for life, not all of them do.
It's universally agreed that water is required for our kind of life, i.e. cellular based life, but what about other types of life that you see depicted in some of the more realistic SF novels? Those hydrogen gas-bags in Clarke's 2001 series aren't completely implausible.
I recently interviewed Dr. Jack Cohen from Warwick University about the plausibility of extra-terrestrial life, including whether water was a prequisite for my site Astrobiology: The Living Universe. You can read the interview here.
The decision that there was no conclusive evidence of life was the correct and brave decision NASA should have made. It would have been only too easy for them to label inconclusive results as positive.
I have the National Geographic: Mars book in front of me now, written between the chief scientific correspondent of AP News and the Mars Pathfinder Project Scientist. I quote:
"There was no money left for testing [of the biological experiments on Viking]... they would have no time to learn how to use them. Some earlier testing had been conducted, but it had been mostly disastrous."
In addition, none of the experiments were positive for life - two of them could be invalidated due to the fact that, unexpectedly, hydrogen peroxide had been found on the surface (basically screwing up the results and mimicing the behaviour of bacteria). They never expected to find hydrogen peroxide and they never tested for it. No wonder they changed the standards for the tests - it would be criminal to do otherwise. The last experiment, the GCMS (Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer), which was supposed to detect the presence of organic chemicals, found none whatsoever.
Am I biased against space exploration and life on Mars? Certainly not - I'm the chair of youth outreach for the Mars Society. However, I know how to draw a line between being blindly optimistic and following the scientific method of accepting the most plausible and supported answer.
Want to know more about the experiments carried on board Viking? Visit here.
http://www.genmars.com/adrian/books/b ank s/
In that case, we agree. The goal of NASA, and of the Mars Society, is to see a self-sustaining colony on Mars. The entire point is that they'll be able to extract oxygen from water and mine it from Mars' atmosphere, they'll be able to take water from permafrost and they'll be able to synthesise rocket fuel from the CO2 in the atmosphere. They'll also try to use Martian materials (esp. magnesium) to create 'native' construction materials, and grow their own food there.
There was also an interesting article in New Scientist about how robots can be used to automatically lay down dozens of square kilometers of solar panels on the Moon or Mars.
No-one wants a 'flag-and-footprints' Mars mission - not NASA, not the public, and not the US government. If we go to Mars, the *minimum* stay will be 18 months, and during that time you can get a lot out of your money in scientific research. We're talking real, ground-breaking planetary geology and biology here, not the dubious science that is set to be conducted on the ISS.
You'll find that private industry is doing quite well - SpaceDev is planning several asteroid prospecting missions and it's almost every week that you hear something new about MirCorp, or Roton, or some other commercial space company. People might scoff at MirCorp's efforts, but they are the first real new development in the commercial use of space (by that, I exclude telecoms and Earth science satellites) for decades. Space tourism is going to be a big thing.
Do you really believe that? The public, especially the American public, is remarkably fickle about matters like this. Given a large publicity budget and the support of the next President, NASA would have absolutely no problem in selling a manned Mars expedition to the country. They'd say it wouldn't cost a lot - NASA wouldn't be likely to need much increase in their overall annual budget.
They'd say it would show America's pioneering spirit, and I think that would touch a nerve with voters. They'd say that it would look for life - and believe it or not, very many people find that interesting.
The responsibility of NASA now is to test, research and develop hardware so that the cost of commercial space utilisation can be brought down. Going to Mars will test out new hardware - I can imagine that exactly how the crews cope for the months long journey will be of interest to any companies considering asteroid mining.
If we ever want to go into space - if humans want to go into space - then sooner or later, money will have to be spent on developing and researching ways to do it. And at first, it will be hugely unprofitable. But NASA, through their R&D, are helping other companies to bring their prices down.
I'm not quite sure I understand your point here. You believe in unmanned space exploration, yet you advocate mining space, terraformation and zero-G manufacturing. All of those will require humans in space. What is that, but space exploration? How can space exploration possible not help that goal?
I think it might do you good to consider your arguments before you post. I would think that the Discovery Channel employs trained scientists as consultants, who most probably do know more than you about this.
Mars and Devon Island (not Canada) are as alike as you can get. Contrary to popular belief, temperatures on Mars are not that low - the average surface temperature is minus 23 centigrade. Devon Island has geological features that are analagous to what might be found on Mars, and it also has fossils and microbes in the vicinity. As such, it's an excellent place to field test any hardware or survey techniques that might be used by manned or unmanned searches for life on Mars.
The Flashline MARS is supposed to serve two purposes; one, it's supposed to allow scientists to have a greater understanding of what would be involved in sending humans to Mars with respect to growing food, conducting expeditions and also social dynamics of the crew. Two, the MARS is also here to drum up public interest in space exploration.
I think the main problem with this line of reasoning is that people fail to realise the number of discoveries that could not have been made without humans in space. Put it this way - everything ever done on Mir, Spacelab or the Space Shuttle would not have been possible without humans. That includes countless biological experiments that needed constant, *intelligent* monitoring and also other observations.
The fact is - if we ever want to go into space as a civilization, there is no getting around the fact that someday we'll have to send some humans up there. And at first, it'll be expensive and they won't be able to do much. But it'll give us the necessary experience to develop more efficient human presences in space.
That is, of course, if you believe in the idea of humans in space.
The Internet's most significant change in the future will be making all forms of communication completely transparent. I'm not talking about privacy issues here, I'm talking about making the process of talking to someone as easy as possible.
With the new giga and tera (and probably exa) byte fibreoptics being laid, it'll be possible to send detailed, real-time 3D holographic data across the Internet. Of course, you'll need technology that will be able to gather this data - probably not any of the traditional laser depth scanners, but more elegant solutions such as sensors woven into the fabric of clothing and perhaps cameras on glasses that will pick up facial expressions.
Then, you'll either need:
a) a good retinal laser projector
or, preferably,
b) a good portable holographic projector
OK - so what is this all for? Having this would mean that you could simply call someone up by saying their name, and they, to all intents and purposes, would appear right alongside you. No typing at computers, no using mobile or videophones - the person you're talking to *will* be there, apart from the fact that you can't touch them (tactile bodysuits apart).
So what? I hear you ask. This is all old VR bullshit, tell us something we don't know.
OK. VR isn't real life. There will be people who won't like going into VR, and besides, you can't walk around the 'real world' while plugged into VR without walking into things.
So if you want to meet with someone in a practical sense while being able to walk around and look like a normal individual, you'll need the person you're talking to to be 'present' in the real world. Barring teleportation technology, holographic projectors are the next best thing.
Imagine it - you have a small holographic projector on your shoulder, and biometric pickups on your clothes. You'll be able to walk around the town or city talking to this person without people giving you funny looks. In fact, it'll be just as if they were there in real life.
It works both ways - the person you're talking to could be walking along the beach or driving in a car - yet you'd both have the illusion of their presence.
This is more of a big deal than you can possibly imagine.
My website (Vavatch Orbital)
I've also got some reviews of his non-Culture novels here
1) Sigh. Of course launch costs are going to come down. And have you ever considered the possibility of actually *using* the raw materials on the asteroid to produce crude cargo pods in situ? I'd remind you of the recent work done on the inflatable parachute/spacecraft, which essentially means you can *throw* something back down to Earth.
If you launch mining apparatus up to an asteroid, that would negate the need for constant 'shuttle' launches.
2) "Noone needs helium 3 or dumb crap like that unless they're looking to offset the mass-expense of earth by making fuel/stuff on the fly." I need not tell you that this sentence doesn't make any sense.
The entire *point* of asteroid mining is that the cost for mining and delivering the materials to Earth or Earth orbit is *cheaper* than what it is now. Do you really think NASA and SpaceDev would even bother researching this if they thought they couldn't make it cheaper? Come on.
3) Would you care to cite some academic papers on this subject? Most asteroids are fluff or crap, and have nowhere to land? Why not tell NASDA or SpaceDev this stunning piece of insight, so they won't have to waste their money on trying to land on an asteroid and mine it.
Of course we know that asteroids have useful materials. We can analyse their composition via careful inspection of wavelengths of light from the asteroid, and we can approximate their mass and density from their motion. Don't make statements you can't back up.
4) Carbonaceous chondrites (I don't suppose you'd know what they are? No) are full of organic materials, water and 'other stuff like that'. Plenty of material to burn for energy. Take up a small nuclear generator or some solar panels, and you're away. There are ideas for using mirrors and solar panels to concentrate solar energy into a single spot for smelting.
5) Outer space settlements are not a solution for overpopulation. But I'm sure people from those crank organisations like NASA, ESA, the Planetary Society and the Mars Society would have words with your claim that 100k will never live off Earth in the next century. 'Apparently' these organisations have people called scientists in them.
6) Why bother going to America? We've got plenty of space where we are in Europe, and it's too difficult to sail across the Atlantic. In fact, why bother coming down from the trees in the first place? It's so much of a bother.
7) Like what? Would you like telling that statement to NASA and Russian astronauts, that they're just Stupid Human Tricks?
8) Yes, it is a valid method of discussion to use arguments without substantiating them. Please go to www.marssociety.org if you want some informed opinion on why we should go to Mars.
9) How on Earth did this get message moderated up to 2?
People forget that we already have clones in the real world - they're called identical twins. And you'll have noticed that identical twins are far from identical in behaviour, so if you clone yourself, chances are that s/he won't be that much like you. Your clone will be brought up in a different environment, with different parents, in a different technological age.
I fail to see why on Earth you'd want to clone yourself, because it's damn well not going to be your soul-mate or any other guff like that.