Your 2.0.0.3 doesn't snapshot its state for you? If you kill it, next time you restart it's supposed to offer you the ability to "restore" the session, which redoes all your tabs and even does a decent job with where you've scrolled to in the page. I haven't had the courage to see it if retains text box state. It's not a "total" snapshot, but it's most of what you need and it's probably better than Evolution.
I poked around in the preferences to see if you might have shut it off, but I don't see a setting for it in the standard preferences dialogs.
Killing Firefox and immediately restarting it is how I've been keeping its memory usage down. (I've cut my plugins down to NoScript, Flashblock, and Nuke Anything, and that has slowed the leaking, but it still leaks. And linux + out of memory + no swap disk seems to go absolutely fucking insane. I still can't figure out what the hell it's doing, even in theory. Note that leaky Firefox is the only reason I need a swap partition at all; otherwise I've got more than enough memory.)
Things that are actually alien. You can get a taste in some of the best hard-core sci-fi, but it's generally understood that we really can't imagine it very well yet. (Not necessarily because we're inherently stupid, but just because right now we don't have much experience with non-human human-quality intelligence; same reason you don't see a lot of Virtual Reality simulations in 1960s science fiction, back when computers were still blinkenlights.)
Almost without exception, species in Star Trek either act random ("mysterious", don't forget the finger waggling), or human. They're not just humans with bumpy heads, they're just humans with bumpy heads. "Peaceful" species are just species full of humans that are peaceful; we've got real people who are equally pacificistic. Klingons are just humans who like to fight; we have those in real life. We have people that would only need to be slightly exaggerated to be Vulcans. We have Romulans in the real world. And so on. It's a rare "alien" that you can't find walking around on Earth today as a human being. Even AIs and holograms have mysteriously human motives and needs. (Sometimes there's good reason for that, sometimes there isn't.) There are exceptions, but they are quite clearly the exceptions, showing up in one episode, where only the human caricatures are recurring characters.
I don't have a problem with Star Trek itself, because it was a reasonable guess at the time. The trends that have come to light since then (especially Moore's Law, which continues on; clock speeds have stalled, but transistor counts have not, but also including biology progress) were just beginning, and nobody could have guessed just how far they'd progress.
The problem I have are the people who still think that the future is going to look like Star Trek. We can now be very certain that of the basic choices, that's not one of them. It's either extinction or a universe of unbelievable complexity and richness, both for better and for worse.
Bah, stop parroting nonsense and think for a bit. If humanity does survive another thousand years and spread across the stars with full mastery of genetics, biology, and technology, in nothing flat cultures will be so mutually alien in every way that it'll make Star Trek look like parochial, small-minded garbage, what with 100 little humanity clones running around.
If we do survive and thrive, diversity will be the least of our problems.
The old "loneliness of the stars" bit is as out of date as, well, Star Trek, as out of date as the idea that "crossing the stars" will be done in tin cans carefully coddling our meat sacks. That may have made sense to 1950s science, but it's obvious nonsense to anyone who uses 21st century science. It's going to be way stranger than Star Trek. You will pine for the days when it was as simple as Star Trek.
assume your audience (often management) was impatient, had limited reading comprehension, and generally ignorant of your subject matter.... Looking back now, I see this was more of a mental exercise than a statement about our future bosses' intellectual abilities.
It's more than that; it also means the presentation gracefully degrades when those things are true.
Presentations are rarely the place for intensive detail; in those rare cases where they are (paper presentation at a conference, other such things), you'll know it. A simple, to-the-point presentation can be followed up with question by interested parties. It's much harder (and less polite) to break into a presentation in progress and say "Nobody's interested in this, can we speed it along?"
And while I'm on it, why is everybody so nuts about this. We should censor the internet? We need to moderate it? What the hell?
I don't think you got my point. Nobody gets banned in my system, just shuffled around to be with people they like.
On that note, I'm not necessarily "hurt" to be called a "homo"... but is it really such a stretch for you to imagine that given the choice between playing with someone that immature and someone not that immature, I might prefer the second? You're thinking too black and white. There's middle ground between "emotional pain" and "uncaring", and in fact there's values outside of those two endpoints too, like, say, enjoyment, something you don't really seem to be accounting for in your rant. My goal isn't to "avoid annoyance". I can do that by not buying the game at all. (Actually my current choice, too.) I'm shooting for an enjoyable environment.
And part of the point of my system is that it works with just identities, not identities tied to real people. Trying to avoid the need for that (which has manifest problems) was part of the point.
I suspect it was too subtle of a system for a Slashdot post, especially described so briefly.
Step one is to take the problem seriously. A lot of people don't. "Sticks and stones may break my bones" most properly ends with "but words can sear my soul." That one stupid saying (in its original form) has probably done more damage than good.
Step two is to create some sort of social mechanism. My suggestion, which I haven't seen yet, is a sort of social network where you can indicate which players you like to play with and which you don't, and automated match-making software will help you hook up with people who have similar "tastes" in people. Thus, you don't have to "ban" the fucktards, you just let the system naturally put them together, where they can be immature at each other all they want (and continue paying subscription fees), whereas other gamers naturally gravitate towards people who want to play more like them. I don't know of anything that works this way; closest I've seen is ways to get some people "banned".
(It'd take some thought to make the system resistant to attacks, but to a first approximation, if you simply weight "I don't like this user" significantly higher than "I like them", then even a massive coordinated attack by the fucktards to "like" people won't work.)
I don't think Firefly jumped the shark to the breaching out of the water level BSG achieved though.
Are you saying Firefly did jump the shark to some extent?
Is it even possible to jump the shark in fourteen episodes and a movie?
Jumping the shark is when the series devolves to nothing but ratings ploys, and has mutated into meaning that a series' premise is played out. I'm not sure what premise could not stretch across that much film, easily, let alone the creation of a sci-fi-sized universe.
(For that matter, I haven't watched BSG at all, but has it already jumped the shark? Seriously? Wow.)
"yay more sunshine, more warmth, what's the fuss, party!"... Science is complex, deal with it. Naive, overly simplistic ideas set off my bullshit alarm
What about the "Boo, killer warmth, we're all doomed, panic!" argument?
By your own standard, you ought to be applauding this article.
IIRC, the game used a password system to store the amount of money you had for the next playthrough, and I'm pretty sure it was an encoding of the amount into letters, not a "level password".
Thus, there's a lot of things you could type to get a lot of money; again IIRC, it doesn't take more than four or five playthroughs to be able to afford everything you want at the starting screen, and any money after that is just bragging rights.
A few moment's thought will show it is the news media that is creating the doom and gloom attitude. Everything a politician says is filtered through them. Bush can get up on a stage and sing praises for 59 minutes and give a dire warning in 1, and that one minute is all you'll hear about. This hasn't quite literally happened, but some things very close to it have.
You speak as if the politicians are creating the divisions, rather than being the manifestation of them.
Countries are divided. That's how it is. If voting one way creates a relatively peaceful union where differences are worked out politely and within the system, and voting the other way creates a fractured country full of acrimony and bad feelings, then one side is clearly a bad loser (and that's more dangerous to democracy than you might think, as the essense of democracy is to have the losers accept their loss, not crown the winners).
And if that is the case, the side that is being the poor losers and choosing to tear apart the democracy rather than accept loss is the side that, when they win, produces the relatively peaceful government. The side that, when they win, produces "polarization" is the more democratic side. (Being in a Democracy means your side loses sometimes. That's life.)
Take that as you will. I've deliberately not name names. For one thing, it's never a choice between total chaos or total harmony, but I'd be confident that taken as trends, this point stands.
I agree that liberal should not = nut job, but that's irrelevant. I'm sure there are plenty of nice moderate guys in ANSWER but the guys in charge are wackos, and as a result anyone who supports their organization is supporting hate filled whack jobs and the same applies here. Until the liberals in this country grow a pair and evict the fascist whackos who won't be happy until total thought policing is implemented for The Cause, the game is still over and liberals might as well be the same as religious nut job. Because it's the religious nut jobs (a "secular" religion, but other than the lack of a "God" there's not much difference... and there are often God-like proxies like "Gaia") at the top making all the decisions and the fact that you are probably a nice reasonable liberal doesn't make them saner.
(Recall the frequent observation that extreme leftist and extreme rightism often merge indistinguishably into each other. I can find liberal whackjobs too; what does that prove about you?)
You pick your favorite and defend their bad decisions (play calls) until the end.... You've just realized one of the fundamental flaws of this America's government system.
No, that's not how it works, and it's trivially provable and obvious.
That's how it works for the people who speak up, post on the internet, etc. That's always how it works. Few people are assertive enough to post on the internet while not holding a position so strongly that almost no conceivable evidence will change their mind. Those that do are generally ignored, because they do things like talk about the good counterarguments, which is far more boring than spewing bile and invective every which way. This is even stronger on TV since only the most "interesting" handful of people can own a show.
But if what you're saying was actually true, then every election would turn out effectively the same, regardless of the candidates, and that is not how it works. States swing back and forth, and while the last couple of Presidential campaigns may have been close to 50%, there's been radical alterations in the makeup of Congress in the meantime.
If what you are saying was true, then the Republicans would still control Congress. Obviously, this is not true.
This is one of those cases where cynicism of the system blinds you to the truth. Some cynicism is good, but you need to be careful with it. You need to look at all of the evidence, not just the evidence jumping up and down demanding to be heard or that reinforces your cynicism, and consider whether the obvious consequences of some claimed truth are coming true.
If you spin a dyson sphere, you dont have to simulate gravity
But remember that in that case, the "gravity" is always perpendicular to the axis of the spin, so only people on the equator get gravity that is "down".
This results in only a single (relatively) thin strip at the equator being habitable, because all the air is down there. Then you wonder why you're building the rest of the sphere. Then you end up making just the ring, and making it stronger. And you're back to Ringworld. (Plus the Ring doesn't have to be a spherical section so the surface can be at a uniform pressure, which increases the available land area a lot.)
Niven explains this in his "Bigger than Worlds" essay as how he came up with the Ringworld in the first place, though it might just be a convenient after-the-fact reasoning process, who knows?
This is why a Dyson Sphere, as a place where humans might happily live inside and frolic away in their meat bodies, is pretty silly. If you insist on this level of mega-tech building a place for meat-bodies to frolic in, Ringworld makes much more sense. However, what makes the most sense of all is the Dyson sphere in its original sense of simply being a structure to capture all the energy output of the sun. For that to occur, you don't actually need one monolithic object; the most likely design is a cloud of real-world-scale objects (somewhere between smart dust and largish, but feasible, spacecraft) carefully orbited in a way to capture all the energy from the star without hitting each other. It's not possible to have every object in the swarm in the sun all the time (you'll sometimes be in shadow), but the net effect of 100% coverage is possible.
His point was that they should have been able to tell he wasn't suited for it.
I've read about this a lot, even been on the receiving end of it once; Google seems to be very spastic about what job offers they give you. It's like they have a template for an "acceptable resume" which is very broad and includes everything from sysadmin to deep-magic AI search engine worker, but once you pass that filter, what job offer they'll talk to you about is randomly selected from the pool of current jobs. So you might qualify for the deep-magic search engine job that is the core of your work, then be referred to interviews for a sysadmin position.
I didn't go much past the "random email solicitation", but even then, despite having my resume on hand the email was talking about a job position that was inappropriate for me. Working for Google is not so awesome that I'm willing to give up my development career to become a system admin for them. Moreover, the fact is that I'm not really qualified to be a large scale system administrator, which really isn't at all like being a developer (entirely different skill set and history). I could work on any web application you can think of, and that's the only way I can imagine I got past their resume screen (even the initial one)... but then they talk about sysadmin jobs. Very random. Honestly unimpressive, I've never heard of such haphazardness from any other company. This is a Google process flaw that needs to be fixed at the HR level.
On top of that,... interviews are fairly known for seeing how you -react- to challenges, not your answers to them, thus the open ended questions.
That's the theory. When it's done correctly, it works.
But the interviewer has to understand that and be on board with it. If they forget why they are asking open-ended questions, it becomes pointless. If they want O(log2N), including the 2 (and despite the meaningless of the 2), then they need to realize that it's going to be an interactive question. If the interviewer gets frustrated that you don't jump directly to the answer, and (even worse) gets frustrated that you insist on asking questions rather than "just giving the correct answer", than the entire interview process really becomes a joke, a crapshoot as to whether you luck into the "correct" answer despite not having enough information to give it.
I've stripped out the word "Google" from your quote because this is a generic response. I see this happening in a lot of people's accounts of technical interviews with many big companies.
I wasn't at the GP's interview, but I get the sense this was in play there. The interviewer was probably asking the questions he'd been told to ask, and expecting the right answers he'd been told to expect, but hadn't picked up on the fact that there was going to have to be some interaction with the interviewee, and it's the interaction that he needed to be looking at, not the "correct answer". (Calling it the "correct answer" tends to load the mind up with certain expectations in many testers; the idea of getting a question correct without arriving at the sole and singular "correct answer" blows some people's minds.)
It appears he's already got some funding. It's not the $200 million he was hoping for, but based on his Google presentation he ought to be able to do good work with what he's gotten and hopefully prove that the $200 million is justified.
(I watched that presentation and while it was compelling, I actually think the funding decision made is the correct one. There's a couple of things he really ought to show on a smaller scale before trying the $200 million project; I don't think he's anywhere near exhausted what he can learn with his smaller prototypes.)
Grandia 3 was released on the Playstation 2. (It may have been released elsewhere, I just know that that statement is true.)
The combat system worked as in Grandia 2, but was otherwise just... unfinished. The world map is simplistic, the story has some big jumps in it like content was cut out and smoothed out afterwards, characters feel unmotivated, and in general, the only thing going for it was the combat. The story in 2 was interesting, 3 felt abortive; not thought out, things happen for little reason unless you fill in a lot of blanks on your own. (Which isn't all bad, but that shouldn't be required.)
Also, the main villain's motive for destroying the world is pretty pathetic. (This is not an uncommon problem, though.)
And where in Grandia 2 if you're not careful you can break the combat system (I find that about halfway through, if you stack all the fire bonuses on one person, you can take out the entire combat field with one area-effect fire spell, which is cheap enough that you can use it all day), in Grandia 3 you had to do such things to survive. Initially, I thought that was because they realized they had a problem, but in hindsight, I think it's because entire sections where you were "supposed" to level up were cut. The end result was, at least for me, actually a smoother difficulty progression than in Grandia 2, but I think that was accidental and a newbie probably wouldn't have experienced it that way.
If somebody were to have a choice of starting with 2 or 3, I'd say 2 in a heartbeat. Preferably on the Dreamcast, but I'd take even the slightly choppy PS2 version over Grandia 3. Very sad.
Is "DragonQuest" 20 years behind the curve in other ways too?
RPG combat mechanics in general have been pretty stagnant in the past 10 years. The best combat system I've ever seen is still Grandia 2 on the Dreamcast, which may not have been all that different than Grandia 1, which I never played. (I did play 3, where the combat is the only redeeming quality, and it's the same as 2 + a couple tweaks.) And that was years ago; IMNSHO, we've actually been moving backwards with the recent focus on real-time BS where we outsource the majority of the combat to computer AIs. (Woo, fun.)
Then could you explain what the difference is between censorship laws and censorship by the back door because the press don't want to loose their privileged access to the president?
Requiring somebody to say something is censorship too.
(Warning, link may cause finely-tuned worldviews to be seriously shaken, but it's as well-sourced as anything you could ask for. Google for more. Who knows what other systematic distortions are in play, and how much effect they've had?)
The point of the GP is that you'd be very hardpressed to replicate all these interactions in a 3D world, partly due to control limitations, and partly because of all the artwork, sound effects, and so forth, that would be necessary.
Exactly. If Nethack developers had fallen under the "Must Be 3D" spell, there'd be no nethack. (Yes, I know Nethack basically predates 3D as a practical gaming technology. Humor me. Still true that the project could theoretically have died trying to make the jump.)
For a more concrete example, see Diablo. Diablo is Angband, in realtime 3D. Angband is substantially simpler than Nethack most ways, yet Diablo still failed to capture the richness of Angband, because even Angband in "glorious 3D" would be a nightmare to create. Let's not even talk about some of the extensions to Angband.
Slashdot Mirror
Your 2.0.0.3 doesn't snapshot its state for you? If you kill it, next time you restart it's supposed to offer you the ability to "restore" the session, which redoes all your tabs and even does a decent job with where you've scrolled to in the page. I haven't had the courage to see it if retains text box state. It's not a "total" snapshot, but it's most of what you need and it's probably better than Evolution.
I poked around in the preferences to see if you might have shut it off, but I don't see a setting for it in the standard preferences dialogs.
Killing Firefox and immediately restarting it is how I've been keeping its memory usage down. (I've cut my plugins down to NoScript, Flashblock, and Nuke Anything, and that has slowed the leaking, but it still leaks. And linux + out of memory + no swap disk seems to go absolutely fucking insane. I still can't figure out what the hell it's doing, even in theory. Note that leaky Firefox is the only reason I need a swap partition at all; otherwise I've got more than enough memory.)
Things that are actually alien. You can get a taste in some of the best hard-core sci-fi, but it's generally understood that we really can't imagine it very well yet. (Not necessarily because we're inherently stupid, but just because right now we don't have much experience with non-human human-quality intelligence; same reason you don't see a lot of Virtual Reality simulations in 1960s science fiction, back when computers were still blinkenlights.)
Almost without exception, species in Star Trek either act random ("mysterious", don't forget the finger waggling), or human. They're not just humans with bumpy heads, they're just humans with bumpy heads. "Peaceful" species are just species full of humans that are peaceful; we've got real people who are equally pacificistic. Klingons are just humans who like to fight; we have those in real life. We have people that would only need to be slightly exaggerated to be Vulcans. We have Romulans in the real world. And so on. It's a rare "alien" that you can't find walking around on Earth today as a human being. Even AIs and holograms have mysteriously human motives and needs. (Sometimes there's good reason for that, sometimes there isn't.) There are exceptions, but they are quite clearly the exceptions, showing up in one episode, where only the human caricatures are recurring characters.
I don't have a problem with Star Trek itself, because it was a reasonable guess at the time. The trends that have come to light since then (especially Moore's Law, which continues on; clock speeds have stalled, but transistor counts have not, but also including biology progress) were just beginning, and nobody could have guessed just how far they'd progress.
The problem I have are the people who still think that the future is going to look like Star Trek. We can now be very certain that of the basic choices, that's not one of them. It's either extinction or a universe of unbelievable complexity and richness, both for better and for worse.
Bah, stop parroting nonsense and think for a bit. If humanity does survive another thousand years and spread across the stars with full mastery of genetics, biology, and technology, in nothing flat cultures will be so mutually alien in every way that it'll make Star Trek look like parochial, small-minded garbage, what with 100 little humanity clones running around.
If we do survive and thrive, diversity will be the least of our problems.
The old "loneliness of the stars" bit is as out of date as, well, Star Trek, as out of date as the idea that "crossing the stars" will be done in tin cans carefully coddling our meat sacks. That may have made sense to 1950s science, but it's obvious nonsense to anyone who uses 21st century science. It's going to be way stranger than Star Trek. You will pine for the days when it was as simple as Star Trek.
Presentations are rarely the place for intensive detail; in those rare cases where they are (paper presentation at a conference, other such things), you'll know it. A simple, to-the-point presentation can be followed up with question by interested parties. It's much harder (and less polite) to break into a presentation in progress and say "Nobody's interested in this, can we speed it along?"
On that note, I'm not necessarily "hurt" to be called a "homo"... but is it really such a stretch for you to imagine that given the choice between playing with someone that immature and someone not that immature, I might prefer the second? You're thinking too black and white. There's middle ground between "emotional pain" and "uncaring", and in fact there's values outside of those two endpoints too, like, say, enjoyment, something you don't really seem to be accounting for in your rant. My goal isn't to "avoid annoyance". I can do that by not buying the game at all. (Actually my current choice, too.) I'm shooting for an enjoyable environment.
And part of the point of my system is that it works with just identities, not identities tied to real people. Trying to avoid the need for that (which has manifest problems) was part of the point.
I suspect it was too subtle of a system for a Slashdot post, especially described so briefly.
I don't think you've grasped the essence of my proposal.
Step one is to take the problem seriously. A lot of people don't. "Sticks and stones may break my bones" most properly ends with "but words can sear my soul." That one stupid saying (in its original form) has probably done more damage than good.
Step two is to create some sort of social mechanism. My suggestion, which I haven't seen yet, is a sort of social network where you can indicate which players you like to play with and which you don't, and automated match-making software will help you hook up with people who have similar "tastes" in people. Thus, you don't have to "ban" the fucktards, you just let the system naturally put them together, where they can be immature at each other all they want (and continue paying subscription fees), whereas other gamers naturally gravitate towards people who want to play more like them. I don't know of anything that works this way; closest I've seen is ways to get some people "banned".
(It'd take some thought to make the system resistant to attacks, but to a first approximation, if you simply weight "I don't like this user" significantly higher than "I like them", then even a massive coordinated attack by the fucktards to "like" people won't work.)
Did you read the Tips and Tricks? I can't tell.
Is it even possible to jump the shark in fourteen episodes and a movie?
Jumping the shark is when the series devolves to nothing but ratings ploys, and has mutated into meaning that a series' premise is played out. I'm not sure what premise could not stretch across that much film, easily, let alone the creation of a sci-fi-sized universe.
(For that matter, I haven't watched BSG at all, but has it already jumped the shark? Seriously? Wow.)
By your own standard, you ought to be applauding this article.
IIRC, the game used a password system to store the amount of money you had for the next playthrough, and I'm pretty sure it was an encoding of the amount into letters, not a "level password".
Thus, there's a lot of things you could type to get a lot of money; again IIRC, it doesn't take more than four or five playthroughs to be able to afford everything you want at the starting screen, and any money after that is just bragging rights.
A few moment's thought will show it is the news media that is creating the doom and gloom attitude. Everything a politician says is filtered through them. Bush can get up on a stage and sing praises for 59 minutes and give a dire warning in 1, and that one minute is all you'll hear about. This hasn't quite literally happened, but some things very close to it have.
You speak as if the politicians are creating the divisions, rather than being the manifestation of them.
Countries are divided. That's how it is. If voting one way creates a relatively peaceful union where differences are worked out politely and within the system, and voting the other way creates a fractured country full of acrimony and bad feelings, then one side is clearly a bad loser (and that's more dangerous to democracy than you might think, as the essense of democracy is to have the losers accept their loss, not crown the winners).
And if that is the case, the side that is being the poor losers and choosing to tear apart the democracy rather than accept loss is the side that, when they win, produces the relatively peaceful government. The side that, when they win, produces "polarization" is the more democratic side. (Being in a Democracy means your side loses sometimes. That's life.)
Take that as you will. I've deliberately not name names. For one thing, it's never a choice between total chaos or total harmony, but I'd be confident that taken as trends, this point stands.
I agree that liberal should not = nut job, but that's irrelevant. I'm sure there are plenty of nice moderate guys in ANSWER but the guys in charge are wackos, and as a result anyone who supports their organization is supporting hate filled whack jobs and the same applies here. Until the liberals in this country grow a pair and evict the fascist whackos who won't be happy until total thought policing is implemented for The Cause, the game is still over and liberals might as well be the same as religious nut job. Because it's the religious nut jobs (a "secular" religion, but other than the lack of a "God" there's not much difference... and there are often God-like proxies like "Gaia") at the top making all the decisions and the fact that you are probably a nice reasonable liberal doesn't make them saner.
(Recall the frequent observation that extreme leftist and extreme rightism often merge indistinguishably into each other. I can find liberal whackjobs too; what does that prove about you?)
That's how it works for the people who speak up, post on the internet, etc. That's always how it works. Few people are assertive enough to post on the internet while not holding a position so strongly that almost no conceivable evidence will change their mind. Those that do are generally ignored, because they do things like talk about the good counterarguments, which is far more boring than spewing bile and invective every which way. This is even stronger on TV since only the most "interesting" handful of people can own a show.
But if what you're saying was actually true, then every election would turn out effectively the same, regardless of the candidates, and that is not how it works. States swing back and forth, and while the last couple of Presidential campaigns may have been close to 50%, there's been radical alterations in the makeup of Congress in the meantime.
If what you are saying was true, then the Republicans would still control Congress. Obviously, this is not true.
This is one of those cases where cynicism of the system blinds you to the truth. Some cynicism is good, but you need to be careful with it. You need to look at all of the evidence, not just the evidence jumping up and down demanding to be heard or that reinforces your cynicism, and consider whether the obvious consequences of some claimed truth are coming true.
This results in only a single (relatively) thin strip at the equator being habitable, because all the air is down there. Then you wonder why you're building the rest of the sphere. Then you end up making just the ring, and making it stronger. And you're back to Ringworld. (Plus the Ring doesn't have to be a spherical section so the surface can be at a uniform pressure, which increases the available land area a lot.)
Niven explains this in his "Bigger than Worlds" essay as how he came up with the Ringworld in the first place, though it might just be a convenient after-the-fact reasoning process, who knows?
This is why a Dyson Sphere, as a place where humans might happily live inside and frolic away in their meat bodies, is pretty silly. If you insist on this level of mega-tech building a place for meat-bodies to frolic in, Ringworld makes much more sense. However, what makes the most sense of all is the Dyson sphere in its original sense of simply being a structure to capture all the energy output of the sun. For that to occur, you don't actually need one monolithic object; the most likely design is a cloud of real-world-scale objects (somewhere between smart dust and largish, but feasible, spacecraft) carefully orbited in a way to capture all the energy from the star without hitting each other. It's not possible to have every object in the swarm in the sun all the time (you'll sometimes be in shadow), but the net effect of 100% coverage is possible.
His point was that they should have been able to tell he wasn't suited for it.
I've read about this a lot, even been on the receiving end of it once; Google seems to be very spastic about what job offers they give you. It's like they have a template for an "acceptable resume" which is very broad and includes everything from sysadmin to deep-magic AI search engine worker, but once you pass that filter, what job offer they'll talk to you about is randomly selected from the pool of current jobs. So you might qualify for the deep-magic search engine job that is the core of your work, then be referred to interviews for a sysadmin position.
I didn't go much past the "random email solicitation", but even then, despite having my resume on hand the email was talking about a job position that was inappropriate for me. Working for Google is not so awesome that I'm willing to give up my development career to become a system admin for them. Moreover, the fact is that I'm not really qualified to be a large scale system administrator, which really isn't at all like being a developer (entirely different skill set and history). I could work on any web application you can think of, and that's the only way I can imagine I got past their resume screen (even the initial one)... but then they talk about sysadmin jobs. Very random. Honestly unimpressive, I've never heard of such haphazardness from any other company. This is a Google process flaw that needs to be fixed at the HR level.
But the interviewer has to understand that and be on board with it. If they forget why they are asking open-ended questions, it becomes pointless. If they want O(log2N), including the 2 (and despite the meaningless of the 2), then they need to realize that it's going to be an interactive question. If the interviewer gets frustrated that you don't jump directly to the answer, and (even worse) gets frustrated that you insist on asking questions rather than "just giving the correct answer", than the entire interview process really becomes a joke, a crapshoot as to whether you luck into the "correct" answer despite not having enough information to give it.
I've stripped out the word "Google" from your quote because this is a generic response. I see this happening in a lot of people's accounts of technical interviews with many big companies.
I wasn't at the GP's interview, but I get the sense this was in play there. The interviewer was probably asking the questions he'd been told to ask, and expecting the right answers he'd been told to expect, but hadn't picked up on the fact that there was going to have to be some interaction with the interviewee, and it's the interaction that he needed to be looking at, not the "correct answer". (Calling it the "correct answer" tends to load the mind up with certain expectations in many testers; the idea of getting a question correct without arriving at the sole and singular "correct answer" blows some people's minds.)
It appears he's already got some funding. It's not the $200 million he was hoping for, but based on his Google presentation he ought to be able to do good work with what he's gotten and hopefully prove that the $200 million is justified.
(I watched that presentation and while it was compelling, I actually think the funding decision made is the correct one. There's a couple of things he really ought to show on a smaller scale before trying the $200 million project; I don't think he's anywhere near exhausted what he can learn with his smaller prototypes.)
Grandia 3 was released on the Playstation 2. (It may have been released elsewhere, I just know that that statement is true.)
The combat system worked as in Grandia 2, but was otherwise just... unfinished. The world map is simplistic, the story has some big jumps in it like content was cut out and smoothed out afterwards, characters feel unmotivated, and in general, the only thing going for it was the combat. The story in 2 was interesting, 3 felt abortive; not thought out, things happen for little reason unless you fill in a lot of blanks on your own. (Which isn't all bad, but that shouldn't be required.)
Also, the main villain's motive for destroying the world is pretty pathetic. (This is not an uncommon problem, though.)
And where in Grandia 2 if you're not careful you can break the combat system (I find that about halfway through, if you stack all the fire bonuses on one person, you can take out the entire combat field with one area-effect fire spell, which is cheap enough that you can use it all day), in Grandia 3 you had to do such things to survive. Initially, I thought that was because they realized they had a problem, but in hindsight, I think it's because entire sections where you were "supposed" to level up were cut. The end result was, at least for me, actually a smoother difficulty progression than in Grandia 2, but I think that was accidental and a newbie probably wouldn't have experienced it that way.
If somebody were to have a choice of starting with 2 or 3, I'd say 2 in a heartbeat. Preferably on the Dreamcast, but I'd take even the slightly choppy PS2 version over Grandia 3. Very sad.
Requiring somebody to say something is censorship too.
(Warning, link may cause finely-tuned worldviews to be seriously shaken, but it's as well-sourced as anything you could ask for. Google for more. Who knows what other systematic distortions are in play, and how much effect they've had?)
For a more concrete example, see Diablo. Diablo is Angband, in realtime 3D. Angband is substantially simpler than Nethack most ways, yet Diablo still failed to capture the richness of Angband, because even Angband in "glorious 3D" would be a nightmare to create. Let's not even talk about some of the extensions to Angband.