The Kárahnjúkar hydroelectric dam is in Iceland, not China. And while there are strong objections from environmentalists, I also doubt that 60,000 people have died as a result of this project.
You didn't watch the video. This thing could also run on deuterium. It would then produce neutrons, but it would still be less dangerous by far than a fission plant.
Who in the world is worried about thin inflatable mirrors reflecting Gamma Rays!? If there were easy and cheap ways to reflect gamma rays, it would be a lot easier to build antimatter fueled photon rockets. Unfortunately, it's quite hard to reflect high energy photons except at very shallow angles of indicence. Either the person being interviewed is half-clued or the writer got something seriously wrong.
Slant, given a steep enough angle, is just as effective as totalitarian-style suppression. You would probably like reading _Manufacturing Consent_ -- that is one of the main points of the book. There is a chapter where they compare/contrast the coverage in the 80's of the brutal murder of a priest in Poland (Soviet Client State) with the same sort of event involving nuns in El Salvador (US client state.)
In the first case, Front-Page coverage, with emotionally wrought language. Multiple pages in the New York Times Sunday magazine. In the second case, just a few column inches on page 2 or further back. Very factual and emotionally neutral language.
It's not Pravda style factual and historical revision. But the effect is pretty much the same. The sad truth is that the US media, including much of the internet, falls under the "Propaganda Model" in _Manufacturing Consent_.
Sorry, but the US is not the good guys. And we haven't been for awhile.
I was answering in part because I thought you were trying to claim cleverness by pretending to have invented memory management. But I see that your point and your knowledge goes deeper than that.
changing the easy pace game design that got them to the 5 million mark for a hardcore systemt that barely gained 100k subscribers? Probably not the best business solution.
Geez, doesn't anyone generalize on their own? (No, people turn off that section of their brain when they want to make a point.)
I wasn't talking about doing the *exact* same thing for WoW. Market forces obviously play a role there just as they do in Eve, the situations and particulars are different. The devs need to figure out how to get them *on their side*. (Which is to say: on the side of mre fun gameplay.)
Work smarter, not harder. A friend of mine was telling me about a problem with MUDs (text precursors of MMORPGs) where the corpses of monsters were building up and clogging the system. The solution? Allow players to use the corpses as ingredients to make healing potions. Players then grabbed corpses and dragged them out of the dungoen to sell potions. Problem solved.
A lot of gamers get on their moral soap-boxes about cheating and gaming ethics, and call for the devs to come up with more enforcement. I think that's just like the "War on Drugs" mentality. It's a losing game, because you are opposing market forces. Instead, get the market forces on your side. Heck, as a MMORPG game dev, you control the fabric of reality itself. If you can't think of a trick to co-opt "cheaters" then shame on you!
I play Eve-Online, and it's come up that the "Macro Miners" are ruining things for legitimate miners. Macro-miners are mostly Russian guys who use macros to run Eve automatically and mine-out whole systems so that they can sell in-game money on eBay.
But while it really sucks to be a competitor to these guys in mining, it's *great* for piracy. The unattended miners are full of valuable ore, and mostly unable to defend themselves. (And if they do defend themselves, they do it poorly, and this allows you to destroy them *legally*!)
So don't try and enforce a ban on macro-mining and other MMORPG "cheats." Instead co-opt them. In Eve, you could change the game dynamic so that the Macro-Miners would be even more attractive targets for pirates. Put a time limit on NPC corporation membership, and legit corps could even declare war on them without being pirates. (So if you're a mining corp, you could just declare war on these guys and take their ore!) Furthermore, if you put time constraints on refining, the macro-miners would be forced to sell material to other players to refine their excess, which would further contribute to the economy of Eve-Online.
And we thought of all this in about 15 minutes flat. I'm quite sure that other tricks could be thought of for WoW and other MMORPGs that would have similar effects.
What would make a great reality TV show, would be a bounty hunting situation. Put a bunch of people in the game, with certain goals. Then also have corporations put out bounties for them part way through. Winner is the last one surviving. Make it hard enough for the regular players to figure out who is on the TV show, and it could be very interesting to watch. More "Survivor" than Survivor.
Some links on getting cheaply to orbit with near-term technology. Mostly Google cache of PDF and slides, I'm afraid. But no nanotubes required! (This is not for the typical science-ignorant/. rube. Nothing flashy, and the words and pictures require imagination and actual physics knowledge to appreciate.)
2-stage makes it sound like the craft from The Rocket Company. But the wings break that mold. And, if you ask me, are probably a bad idea! Why? Read The Rocket Company. (Just about the best near-term Sci-Fi book about building reusable rockets, but with *tons* of meaty science & engineering factual tidbits!)
LinkSys NSLU2. Plugs into your home network. (10/100) Then you get yourself 2 IDE drives and 2 USB 2.0 enclosures then plug them in. Then you can set it to periodically back-up one drive to the other. Sure, it's not as bullet-proof as RAID5. But it's dead simple, cheap, and it just works. Failure recovery is dead simple. Also, the system is has some of the same flexibility as the Buffalo Teraserver. (Plug in your friend's USB 2.0 drive when he comes over.)
Also, with this scheme, you can delete a file and change your mind. (Recover from the back-up before the weekly copy job.)
And, if this is too simple for your geek quotient, it's Linux-based and hackable!
Not a problem if we use algae as the feedstock. We can use non-arable land, salt water, and sewage to grow the algae. And since it has a conversion efficiency several times higher than soybeans, it becomes feasible to supply *ALL* of the vehicular energy needs of the US using biodiesel.
The biggest thing you gain is that you no longer are at the mercy of the "Rocket Equation." Your "Specific Impulse" which (since you have no knowledge of this aspect) you can think of as the "mass efficiency" of your orbital craft becomes essentially infinite -- your available reaction mass becomes the entire Earth, even though you don't have to carry it with you.
Also, you also missed schemes involving energy recovery from inbound cargoes. If you extract energy from cargoes going down through regenerative braking, you can use that energy to bring up the outbound cargoes. (Up = trading kinetic for potential energy. Down is the reverse. This discounts orbital velocity, but so long as the up & down traffic balances, it works out.)
The Prius and Insight are parallel hybirds. The engine driveshaft directly drives the wheels. In a serial hybrid, only the electric motor drives the wheels. This way, the engine can be specifically engineered to run the generator in its most fuel efficient part of its operation envelope.
Firefly's problem is that it didn't start off with a huge bang to grab people's attention, like the plane crash in Lost, or even the suicide in Desperate Housewives. It just had a random handful of miscreants aimlessly wandering the galaxy in a beater starship. Not a whole lot of sex appeal either. Even the whore didn't tease it up much, and things went way downhill from there. Plus, the 'space western' moniker manages to turn off the scifi fans and the scifi detractors at the same time. The only viewers that initially tuned in were the hardcore scifi buffs (like me), or the hardcore Whedon fans that would tune in to watch a soap commercial if he made one.
The fact that this is a "problem" is a sad commentary on the intelligence level of general viewership. Also, if one is at all knowledgeable, many of the "Western" aspects like the 6-shooters make more sense Sci-Fi wise than everybody having exotic beam weapons. (Heat dissipation issues. Energy storage issues. Lasers & particle weapons have inexpensive yet very effective countermeasures. Impossible to maintain or build without extensive tech infrastructure. Weapons with visible beams are easy to trace back to the shooter.)
Slashdot Mirror
The Kárahnjúkar hydroelectric dam is in Iceland, not China. And while there are strong objections from environmentalists, I also doubt that 60,000 people have died as a result of this project.
And this got modded up to +4 insightful?
You didn't watch the video. This thing could also run on deuterium. It would then produce neutrons, but it would still be less dangerous by far than a fission plant.
incidence, not indicence
Who in the world is worried about thin inflatable mirrors reflecting Gamma Rays!? If there were easy and cheap ways to reflect gamma rays, it would be a lot easier to build antimatter fueled photon rockets. Unfortunately, it's quite hard to reflect high energy photons except at very shallow angles of indicence. Either the person being interviewed is half-clued or the writer got something seriously wrong.
It's the new American Way!
1) Patent something
2) Sit on it until someone does something similar
3) Sue!
4) Profit!
Now we know what goes in place of "???"
Yes, this is a repeat! That's actually one of the worst parts -- that this stuff keeps on happening!
Is this the new "In Soviet Union..."?
It's the American way.
1) Invent a good compression algorithm and patent it
2) Make sure everyone implements it and puts in into their products
3) Sue!
4) Profit
Now we know what to put in place of the ???
Slant, given a steep enough angle, is just as effective as totalitarian-style suppression. You would probably like reading _Manufacturing Consent_ -- that is one of the main points of the book. There is a chapter where they compare/contrast the coverage in the 80's of the brutal murder of a priest in Poland (Soviet Client State) with the same sort of event involving nuns in El Salvador (US client state.)
In the first case, Front-Page coverage, with emotionally wrought language. Multiple pages in the New York Times Sunday magazine. In the second case, just a few column inches on page 2 or further back. Very factual and emotionally neutral language.
It's not Pravda style factual and historical revision. But the effect is pretty much the same. The sad truth is that the US media, including much of the internet, falls under the "Propaganda Model" in _Manufacturing Consent_.
Sorry, but the US is not the good guys. And we haven't been for awhile.
If you travel a lot, it becomes clear that different parts of the world have news broadcasts with a different slant.
Manufacturing Consent
Yes! This game is actually designed as a comfort game. It's a little work of art. I'm going to go play it right now.
Pics are PG-13, but Not necessarily work safe.
It's a one player game, but there's definitely something for her to do. Just think of it as automating foreplay while you get game time.
Rez w/Trance Vibrator
I bow to your greater MUD coding experience.
I was answering in part because I thought you were trying to claim cleverness by pretending to have invented memory management. But I see that your point and your knowledge goes deeper than that.
changing the easy pace game design that got them to the 5 million mark for a hardcore systemt that barely gained 100k subscribers? Probably not the best business solution.
Geez, doesn't anyone generalize on their own? (No, people turn off that section of their brain when they want to make a point.)
I wasn't talking about doing the *exact* same thing for WoW. Market forces obviously play a role there just as they do in Eve, the situations and particulars are different. The devs need to figure out how to get them *on their side*. (Which is to say: on the side of mre fun gameplay.)
Wow, aren't you clever!
Of course (like duh) but apparently there were other reasons why the corpses of monsters were persistent. (For puzzle purposes.)
And, I think the fact that objects stick around makes games better -- characters can have an actual effect on the environment.
Work smarter, not harder. A friend of mine was telling me about a problem with MUDs (text precursors of MMORPGs) where the corpses of monsters were building up and clogging the system. The solution? Allow players to use the corpses as ingredients to make healing potions. Players then grabbed corpses and dragged them out of the dungoen to sell potions. Problem solved.
A lot of gamers get on their moral soap-boxes about cheating and gaming ethics, and call for the devs to come up with more enforcement. I think that's just like the "War on Drugs" mentality. It's a losing game, because you are opposing market forces. Instead, get the market forces on your side. Heck, as a MMORPG game dev, you control the fabric of reality itself. If you can't think of a trick to co-opt "cheaters" then shame on you!
I play Eve-Online, and it's come up that the "Macro Miners" are ruining things for legitimate miners. Macro-miners are mostly Russian guys who use macros to run Eve automatically and mine-out whole systems so that they can sell in-game money on eBay.
But while it really sucks to be a competitor to these guys in mining, it's *great* for piracy. The unattended miners are full of valuable ore, and mostly unable to defend themselves. (And if they do defend themselves, they do it poorly, and this allows you to destroy them *legally*!)
So don't try and enforce a ban on macro-mining and other MMORPG "cheats." Instead co-opt them. In Eve, you could change the game dynamic so that the Macro-Miners would be even more attractive targets for pirates. Put a time limit on NPC corporation membership, and legit corps could even declare war on them without being pirates. (So if you're a mining corp, you could just declare war on these guys and take their ore!) Furthermore, if you put time constraints on refining, the macro-miners would be forced to sell material to other players to refine their excess, which would further contribute to the economy of Eve-Online.
And we thought of all this in about 15 minutes flat. I'm quite sure that other tricks could be thought of for WoW and other MMORPGs that would have similar effects.
One of the rare occasions where real insight from significant experience appears in Slashdot!
What would make a great reality TV show, would be a bounty hunting situation. Put a bunch of people in the game, with certain goals. Then also have corporations put out bounties for them part way through. Winner is the last one surviving. Make it hard enough for the regular players to figure out who is on the TV show, and it could be very interesting to watch. More "Survivor" than Survivor.
--SCZ
2-stage makes it sound like the craft from The Rocket Company. But the wings break that mold. And, if you ask me, are probably a bad idea! Why? Read The Rocket Company. (Just about the best near-term Sci-Fi book about building reusable rockets, but with *tons* of meaty science & engineering factual tidbits!)
LinkSys NSLU2. Plugs into your home network. (10/100) Then you get yourself 2 IDE drives and 2 USB 2.0 enclosures then plug them in. Then you can set it to periodically back-up one drive to the other. Sure, it's not as bullet-proof as RAID5. But it's dead simple, cheap, and it just works. Failure recovery is dead simple. Also, the system is has some of the same flexibility as the Buffalo Teraserver. (Plug in your friend's USB 2.0 drive when he comes over.)
Also, with this scheme, you can delete a file and change your mind. (Recover from the back-up before the weekly copy job.)
And, if this is too simple for your geek quotient, it's Linux-based and hackable!
It won't be enough. Why? Because The Internet is for Porn! (A hilarious video via Google Video)
Not a problem if we use algae as the feedstock. We can use non-arable land, salt water, and sewage to grow the algae. And since it has a conversion efficiency several times higher than soybeans, it becomes feasible to supply *ALL* of the vehicular energy needs of the US using biodiesel.
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html
The biggest thing you gain is that you no longer are at the mercy of the "Rocket Equation." Your "Specific Impulse" which (since you have no knowledge of this aspect) you can think of as the "mass efficiency" of your orbital craft becomes essentially infinite -- your available reaction mass becomes the entire Earth, even though you don't have to carry it with you.
a tion.html
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/RocketEqu
Also, you also missed schemes involving energy recovery from inbound cargoes. If you extract energy from cargoes going down through regenerative braking, you can use that energy to bring up the outbound cargoes. (Up = trading kinetic for potential energy. Down is the reverse. This discounts orbital velocity, but so long as the up & down traffic balances, it works out.)
--SCZ
The Prius and Insight are parallel hybirds. The engine driveshaft directly drives the wheels. In a serial hybrid, only the electric motor drives the wheels. This way, the engine can be specifically engineered to run the generator in its most fuel efficient part of its operation envelope.
Firefly's problem is that it didn't start off with a huge bang to grab people's attention, like the plane crash in Lost, or even the suicide in Desperate Housewives. It just had a random handful of miscreants aimlessly wandering the galaxy in a beater starship. Not a whole lot of sex appeal either. Even the whore didn't tease it up much, and things went way downhill from there. Plus, the 'space western' moniker manages to turn off the scifi fans and the scifi detractors at the same time. The only viewers that initially tuned in were the hardcore scifi buffs (like me), or the hardcore Whedon fans that would tune in to watch a soap commercial if he made one.
The fact that this is a "problem" is a sad commentary on the intelligence level of general viewership. Also, if one is at all knowledgeable, many of the "Western" aspects like the 6-shooters make more sense Sci-Fi wise than everybody having exotic beam weapons. (Heat dissipation issues. Energy storage issues. Lasers & particle weapons have inexpensive yet very effective countermeasures. Impossible to maintain or build without extensive tech infrastructure. Weapons with visible beams are easy to trace back to the shooter.)
And yes, Joss Whedon is brilliant!