What have YOU done for South Africa? How many starving kids have YOU fed? How can you sit there on a computer, a frivolous item, when you could have used that money to SAVE THE EARTH?
In our nuclear adolescence we can barely handle plutonium... total conversion of matter to energy is something I wouldn't want us to play with for a long, long time!
If you do the math (E=MC^2) the results are pretty scary. Drop a half-kilo of antimatter and you convert 1 kilo of matter to energy, resulting in a 25 megaton explosion, if I remember right.
Luckily antimatter is hard to make in large quantities (like, over a few hundred antiprotons). Even luckier, no one has invented a magic field or ray that lets matter convert itself into energy.
Antimatter would be great fuel if we had the technology to create and handle large quantities of it... but man, I wouldn't want THAT factory in my back yard!
Sign me up too! I'd take 2 if they would give me one of those creepy experimental scultures they may use to mark waste sites. Check this link for a neat discussion of that.
The only real concern I have is disposal of nuclear waste, but most modern reactors have been taking good approaches to that...
Problem: those plans, while neat, aren't in effect yet. Name one such high-level waste disposal site in the US. There aren't any.
Power plants have been keeping their worst waste on site, in temporary holding areas that were never designed to be long-term solutions. We need a national solution and we need it fast.
It could be worse: in Russia there has been at least one incident of poorly-stored waste going critical and poof! Spontaneous explosion. Something about spent rods in a plastic-lined ditch, and rainwater leached uranium out where it collected underneath... Spooky.
But hey, I'd want cheaper access to space if the rocket had to run on the blood of orphans. On with the nuke!
Good points and I would add this: The United States has detonated about a hundred atomic weapons above ground in Nevada. Back in "the day" you could see the tests from Vegas -- I once saw an amazing photo of a glowing mushroom cloud above the Fremont Street skyline. I can't find it now, but here is a similar image. Mind-blowing.
I'm not saying all these atmospheric tests were GREAT but we're still here, with the equivalent of over 100 Hiroshimas in our back yard. (and I know about the fallout/health/cancer studies and all that, like I said it wasn't a great idea, but it also didn't destroy the country or even just Nevada.)
The radioisotope thermal generators used in Cassini and other missions are AMAZINGLY tough. They are designed to survive a re-entry. Mostly, anyway... the re-entry scenario is the RTG landing almost intact, with the radioactive material spread out over a very small area near the impact site. Like, meters, not miles. (When I worked at JPL I got to look at a lot of the documentation, even though I worked in a different section. Neat stuff.)
An explosion on the pad, or in boost, would be a lot less stress on the RTG than re-entry. Think about the Challenger explosion: the crew were thought to be alive in the nose section until impact with the ocean. If there was an RTG in that area of the ship, it would have easily survived.
IMHO gaming of all sorts (but mostly RPGing) is fading back into the darkness of obscurity...
Then you aren't paying attention. The RPG market is growing. It's more popular now than it has been in years.
It will never be a mass-market activity, but it does have its little booms and busts. Right now it's on the upslope. Where it tops out remains to be seen but I think the plateau is in sight.
Question is, where will the crash come and what will start it?
Re:How is the pencil-n-paper business these days?
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SJGames Layoffs
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I was too dumb to stay out of the industry forever, so I am publishing stuff for 3rd Ed. D&D. On the one hand I like having a well-known system for which it is legal to print new materials... on the other hand the D20 System has come to really dominate the marketplace. Lots of upcoming games are being released under this (somewhat retarded) rules system when they would be better off doing their own thing.
There's a Farscape RPG on the way, for example... and it will use the 3rd Ed D20 rules. But I can't really blame the publisher completely for that, the system is so popular you'd probably be crazy not to use it, even where it doesn't fit.
I wish that GURPS had opened up their system. If they did that a while ago they'd be reaping the benefits today, and I wouldn't be stuck playing 3rd Ed rules so much!
Third Edition has followed AOLs example and dumbed the game down slightly.
I wouldn't put it that way. 3rd Ed is more simple, yes, but mostly in good ways. Like one experience table for all classes... getting rid of special-purpose rolls like "listen at doors" in favor of a generic roll-and-add skill system... making AC an additive system... It still has PLENTY of warts but it's an improvement on 2nd Ed, IMHO.
I still don't think it's the best choice for sci-fi games. Heck, I don't think it's the best choice for fantasy, but I seem to be in the minority.
You have almost all of it. There is one additional element: when the term "soccer mom" is used by a conservative (someone to the political "right" in the States) it also implies that there is an element of hand-wringing "what about the children" liberal nonsense to the person.
To someone on the left, all that hand-wringing and wailing about the children is the foundation of their political belief and is taken seriously.;)
A couple of neat window management features and the availability of a few good apps is not a solid foundation for a statement like "KDE beats any other GUI easily."
I agree that BLIND nationalism can be really dangerous. But too many people seem to be of the mind that saying, "yeah, we're OK!" and putting out the flag once a year is some kind of dangerous obsession. There's a big difference between your basic national pride and a Hitler rally.
And here's the really ironic thing: the people who want to take responsibility for the country's actions -- the people who are politically motivated, and write their legislators and all that -- those are the people that are most likely to be tarred with the "crazy patriot" brush.
Mindless patriots can do a lot of damage, but conscientious patriots are the only thing stopping the whackos from taking over, in every nation. Please don't confuse the two groups.
The car example doesn't cut it. You don't ingest a car, and it can't affect your brain chemistry. On the other hand a drug like PCP can make you frip your wig.
People need to wake up and realize that the worst aspects that are attributed to drugs are in fact a direct result of the drug war and criminalization.
I think that is LARGELY but not COMPLETELY true.
Here is the point I am trying to make: imagine there is a new drug that makes you feel great AND drives you into a homicidal rage where you may do harm to others. Should this chemical be legal in your libertarian world view and if so why? (And saying it should be legal because there are other things legal that are just as bad doesn't cut it.)
We'll still have our tape collections for when we need a Scully fix after all:-)
I never got into the Cult of Scully. I always thought she was a weak character, a real waste of potential. She's a weak personally, always taking orders from Mulder. She's weak in combat, always seeming to get her gun knocked away. And lately with the baby thing she's been weak emotionally.
They could have written her much better, made her a PARTNER to Mulder instead of a subordinate. They could have made her tougher, which EVERY GUY would have loved. Women viewers too, I suspect. But they overdid her role as a foil to Mulder, and as a result she's just not that interesting, being incapable of anything but a good autopsy. A real waste.
She is a hottie though.:)
Anyway, I say BRING ON the new agents. Maybe they can bring the show back from the zombie-like state it has been in for years.
Coupled with that the stories dont even make sense any more, its like the writers forget what they wrote half way through an episode and just leave things unexplained.
Thank god, I thought it was just me... seems like the show has been failing to do any quality storytelling for years now.
I like Robert Patrick, a lot better than Mulder actually... but he can't save the show. Stick a fork in it... you know the rest. At least it had a few good seasons.
Some chemicals are demonstrably more dangerous than others, so addictive that they'll drive people to committ crimes to pay for their next fix. Some drugs can cause violent activity. I think it is pretty reasonable to restrict access to them because they aren't always "victimless crimes."
(yes, I am aware of the hypocrisy of alcohol. but just because we have by tradition allowed booze into society doesn't mean we should open the door to other stuff that will cause the same problems or worse.)
Some drugs like pot, yeah, legalization is worth discussing. But I don't think that all drugs fall into that category. Hey, I could be wrong... it would be interesting to see what the US would be like if all drugs were legal. I suspect that the "culture of abuse" is just part of America though and people still wouldn't use responsibly even if it was legal to do so. And even if they would, drugs that put someone into a violent state of mind should still be illegal.
Fact is that law enforcement goes off half-cocked way too often. I'm generally a big supporter of federal and local cops but they do make mistakes and "cowboys" have often ruined the lives of innocent people. Inviting more police attention to yourself is downright crazy even if you are innocent.
No, they would have to prosecute you and show concrete evidence that you are dealing/using drugs.
Well, they can actually seize quite a lot of your stuff without any kind of trial. Read up on asset seizure laws. It's amazing what they can get away with. (I know that some of these laws have recently been changed or stricken, thankfully, but I don't know the details.)
I can really understand the attraction to thinking "it's OK, it's for my own good and nothing bad could ever come of it." But if you do a little research you'll quickly see that it's a difficult position to defend. Terrible things happen to people all the time at the hands of the state. As citizens it's our right and duty to keep the government on its toes and not budge an inch unless it is 100% reasonable to do so.
The "slippery slope" is one hell of a cliche, but that doesn't make the slope any less slippery. Read my sig. Grok it. It's the truth.
An appropriate case needs to be made, and it needs to work its way through the lower courts. Hey, it may be happening already; the great DCMA challenge may be underway though unreported yet. The court system is huge.
Too bad there aren't packs of pro-bono constitutional law lawyers looking for this kind of case to take on. At least we have the EFF/ACLU/etc.
Patriotism and owning a national flag is something that only the skinheads do.
Increasingly it's like that at home too though, at least out on the west coast where I live. I know a lot of otherwise-normal people who are extremely suspicious of anyone who displays any hint of national pride. I had no idea that this was a problem not unique to the States.
It's OK to be proud of your country, even if it happens to be Germany!
The TJ quote was talking about ideas. From the article it looks like TJ saw a distinction between the idea and the *expression* of an idea, which is copyrightable in his mind. I think the original poster may have not used the quote 100% correctly... TJ would not have sanctioned ripping off your book, but I don't think he would have had a problem with someone else using the original ideas in your book to create their own work.
As a "content creator" myself this sits fine with me.
In IE for Windows you need to hit ctrl-enter to get it to do the www. and.com thing. If you don't use ctrl you get to a MSN search page... after a really long wait. Don't know why you got an error.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, Troll-Man, I'll bite.
What have YOU done for South Africa? How many starving kids have YOU fed? How can you sit there on a computer, a frivolous item, when you could have used that money to SAVE THE EARTH?
In our nuclear adolescence we can barely handle plutonium... total conversion of matter to energy is something I wouldn't want us to play with for a long, long time!
If you do the math (E=MC^2) the results are pretty scary. Drop a half-kilo of antimatter and you convert 1 kilo of matter to energy, resulting in a 25 megaton explosion, if I remember right.
Luckily antimatter is hard to make in large quantities (like, over a few hundred antiprotons). Even luckier, no one has invented a magic field or ray that lets matter convert itself into energy.
Antimatter would be great fuel if we had the technology to create and handle large quantities of it... but man, I wouldn't want THAT factory in my back yard!
Sign me up too! I'd take 2 if they would give me one of those creepy experimental scultures they may use to mark waste sites. Check this link for a neat discussion of that.
The only real concern I have is disposal of nuclear waste, but most modern reactors have been taking good approaches to that...
Problem: those plans, while neat, aren't in effect yet. Name one such high-level waste disposal site in the US. There aren't any.
Power plants have been keeping their worst waste on site, in temporary holding areas that were never designed to be long-term solutions. We need a national solution and we need it fast.
It could be worse: in Russia there has been at least one incident of poorly-stored waste going critical and poof! Spontaneous explosion. Something about spent rods in a plastic-lined ditch, and rainwater leached uranium out where it collected underneath... Spooky.
But hey, I'd want cheaper access to space if the rocket had to run on the blood of orphans. On with the nuke!
Good points and I would add this: The United States has detonated about a hundred atomic weapons above ground in Nevada. Back in "the day" you could see the tests from Vegas -- I once saw an amazing photo of a glowing mushroom cloud above the Fremont Street skyline. I can't find it now, but here is a similar image. Mind-blowing.
I'm not saying all these atmospheric tests were GREAT but we're still here, with the equivalent of over 100 Hiroshimas in our back yard. (and I know about the fallout/health/cancer studies and all that, like I said it wasn't a great idea, but it also didn't destroy the country or even just Nevada.)
The radioisotope thermal generators used in Cassini and other missions are AMAZINGLY tough. They are designed to survive a re-entry. Mostly, anyway... the re-entry scenario is the RTG landing almost intact, with the radioactive material spread out over a very small area near the impact site. Like, meters, not miles. (When I worked at JPL I got to look at a lot of the documentation, even though I worked in a different section. Neat stuff.)
An explosion on the pad, or in boost, would be a lot less stress on the RTG than re-entry. Think about the Challenger explosion: the crew were thought to be alive in the nose section until impact with the ocean. If there was an RTG in that area of the ship, it would have easily survived.
IMHO gaming of all sorts (but mostly RPGing) is fading back into the darkness of obscurity...
Then you aren't paying attention. The RPG market is growing. It's more popular now than it has been in years.
It will never be a mass-market activity, but it does have its little booms and busts. Right now it's on the upslope. Where it tops out remains to be seen but I think the plateau is in sight.
Question is, where will the crash come and what will start it?
I was too dumb to stay out of the industry forever, so I am publishing stuff for 3rd Ed. D&D. On the one hand I like having a well-known system for which it is legal to print new materials... on the other hand the D20 System has come to really dominate the marketplace. Lots of upcoming games are being released under this (somewhat retarded) rules system when they would be better off doing their own thing.
There's a Farscape RPG on the way, for example... and it will use the 3rd Ed D20 rules. But I can't really blame the publisher completely for that, the system is so popular you'd probably be crazy not to use it, even where it doesn't fit.
I wish that GURPS had opened up their system. If they did that a while ago they'd be reaping the benefits today, and I wouldn't be stuck playing 3rd Ed rules so much!
Third Edition has followed AOLs example and dumbed the game down slightly.
I wouldn't put it that way. 3rd Ed is more simple, yes, but mostly in good ways. Like one experience table for all classes... getting rid of special-purpose rolls like "listen at doors" in favor of a generic roll-and-add skill system... making AC an additive system... It still has PLENTY of warts but it's an improvement on 2nd Ed, IMHO.
I still don't think it's the best choice for sci-fi games. Heck, I don't think it's the best choice for fantasy, but I seem to be in the minority.
To make a bootable PSX CD legally don't you need to license some kind of code from Sony?
Why are you assuming I'm a Mac bigot? Sorry I took a shot at your "argument," such as it was.
You have almost all of it. There is one additional element: when the term "soccer mom" is used by a conservative (someone to the political "right" in the States) it also implies that there is an element of hand-wringing "what about the children" liberal nonsense to the person.
To someone on the left, all that hand-wringing and wailing about the children is the foundation of their political belief and is taken seriously.
[ducking!]
A couple of neat window management features and the availability of a few good apps is not a solid foundation for a statement like "KDE beats any other GUI easily."
I agree that BLIND nationalism can be really dangerous. But too many people seem to be of the mind that saying, "yeah, we're OK!" and putting out the flag once a year is some kind of dangerous obsession. There's a big difference between your basic national pride and a Hitler rally.
And here's the really ironic thing: the people who want to take responsibility for the country's actions -- the people who are politically motivated, and write their legislators and all that -- those are the people that are most likely to be tarred with the "crazy patriot" brush.
Mindless patriots can do a lot of damage, but conscientious patriots are the only thing stopping the whackos from taking over, in every nation. Please don't confuse the two groups.
The car example doesn't cut it. You don't ingest a car, and it can't affect your brain chemistry. On the other hand a drug like PCP can make you frip your wig.
People need to wake up and realize that the worst aspects that are attributed to drugs are in fact a direct result of the drug war and criminalization.
I think that is LARGELY but not COMPLETELY true.
Here is the point I am trying to make: imagine there is a new drug that makes you feel great AND drives you into a homicidal rage where you may do harm to others. Should this chemical be legal in your libertarian world view and if so why? (And saying it should be legal because there are other things legal that are just as bad doesn't cut it.)
Hahah, no really, the other day my grandma was sitting at my OS9 Mac and she tore me a new one because she couldn't run bash on it.
Hilarious.
That was pretty interesting. But even if heroin is safe, aren't there other drugs that aren't? Can't PCP incite violent behavior, for example?
We'll still have our tape collections for when we need a Scully fix after all :-)
:)
I never got into the Cult of Scully. I always thought she was a weak character, a real waste of potential. She's a weak personally, always taking orders from Mulder. She's weak in combat, always seeming to get her gun knocked away. And lately with the baby thing she's been weak emotionally.
They could have written her much better, made her a PARTNER to Mulder instead of a subordinate. They could have made her tougher, which EVERY GUY would have loved. Women viewers too, I suspect. But they overdid her role as a foil to Mulder, and as a result she's just not that interesting, being incapable of anything but a good autopsy. A real waste.
She is a hottie though.
Anyway, I say BRING ON the new agents. Maybe they can bring the show back from the zombie-like state it has been in for years.
Coupled with that the stories dont even make sense any more, its like the writers forget what they wrote half way through an episode and just leave things unexplained.
Thank god, I thought it was just me... seems like the show has been failing to do any quality storytelling for years now.
I like Robert Patrick, a lot better than Mulder actually... but he can't save the show. Stick a fork in it... you know the rest. At least it had a few good seasons.
Some chemicals are demonstrably more dangerous than others, so addictive that they'll drive people to committ crimes to pay for their next fix. Some drugs can cause violent activity. I think it is pretty reasonable to restrict access to them because they aren't always "victimless crimes."
(yes, I am aware of the hypocrisy of alcohol. but just because we have by tradition allowed booze into society doesn't mean we should open the door to other stuff that will cause the same problems or worse.)
Some drugs like pot, yeah, legalization is worth discussing. But I don't think that all drugs fall into that category. Hey, I could be wrong... it would be interesting to see what the US would be like if all drugs were legal. I suspect that the "culture of abuse" is just part of America though and people still wouldn't use responsibly even if it was legal to do so. And even if they would, drugs that put someone into a violent state of mind should still be illegal.
You're perfectly safe until you actually build a bomb, start your own little chemical war with chlorine or go nuts with your shotgun.
Tell that to Randy Weaver's wife and son. Or Donald Scott.
Fact is that law enforcement goes off half-cocked way too often. I'm generally a big supporter of federal and local cops but they do make mistakes and "cowboys" have often ruined the lives of innocent people. Inviting more police attention to yourself is downright crazy even if you are innocent.
No, they would have to prosecute you and show concrete evidence that you are dealing/using drugs.
Well, they can actually seize quite a lot of your stuff without any kind of trial. Read up on asset seizure laws. It's amazing what they can get away with. (I know that some of these laws have recently been changed or stricken, thankfully, but I don't know the details.)
I can really understand the attraction to thinking "it's OK, it's for my own good and nothing bad could ever come of it." But if you do a little research you'll quickly see that it's a difficult position to defend. Terrible things happen to people all the time at the hands of the state. As citizens it's our right and duty to keep the government on its toes and not budge an inch unless it is 100% reasonable to do so.
The "slippery slope" is one hell of a cliche, but that doesn't make the slope any less slippery. Read my sig. Grok it. It's the truth.
An appropriate case needs to be made, and it needs to work its way through the lower courts. Hey, it may be happening already; the great DCMA challenge may be underway though unreported yet. The court system is huge.
Too bad there aren't packs of pro-bono constitutional law lawyers looking for this kind of case to take on. At least we have the EFF/ACLU/etc.
Patriotism and owning a national flag is something that only the skinheads do.
Increasingly it's like that at home too though, at least out on the west coast where I live. I know a lot of otherwise-normal people who are extremely suspicious of anyone who displays any hint of national pride. I had no idea that this was a problem not unique to the States.
It's OK to be proud of your country, even if it happens to be Germany!
The TJ quote was talking about ideas. From the article it looks like TJ saw a distinction between the idea and the *expression* of an idea, which is copyrightable in his mind. I think the original poster may have not used the quote 100% correctly... TJ would not have sanctioned ripping off your book, but I don't think he would have had a problem with someone else using the original ideas in your book to create their own work.
As a "content creator" myself this sits fine with me.
I'm sick of hearing the "I've got a hair up my ass and I'll fly off the handle at the slightest provocation" crap.
In IE for Windows you need to hit ctrl-enter to get it to do the www. and