It's the massive, extreme inequalities on the scale of 1,000,000:1 that result in massive-scale poverty that I have a problem with, because society is supposed to be for the benefit of everyone - it's why we build them. We're supposed to make a living together. It's the "profit at all costs" motive that erases that benefit and begins to benefit the few at the great expense of the many.
I've always had the idea that I'd like to personally say where my tax money goes. Well I don't pay the government enough for me to personally divide up my money myself. I think that those like Bill Gates or anyone that pays more than $100K a year in taxes should be able to directly spend their "tax money" on the public projects that they want their money spent on. It makes sense at an individual level. I doubt the same idea would work for companies or industries for them to directly funnel their tax money into government programs that their company sees as needing funding. I wonder what kinda of results that would have. Most industries would spend their tax money on public government projects that made us of their industry or company. I wonder if it could work.
It could also serve to explain some of the executive stealing too. I've noticed year round as I talk to executives, they frequently seem to have some sort of food available for people to grab and much on, usually provided or acquired by their administrative assistant. An executive is more likely to be used to random cookies/bagels/muffins/whatever to magically appear for free consumption than us peons at the bottom.
Just putting forth an alternative explanation.
When I worked with my dad, there was this little old lady that came by selling bread products from.5-$1 each once a week or so. Every now and then, one of the bosses would buy all the bread products and just give them to everyone that happened to be around the main office. (Said little old lady did not leave her products out unattended, she stood their and sold them.) I'll agree with both. If food just shows up, most people assume that it is a free gift, or some one had a pot luck or something. The more high income a profession the more this happens without anyone thinking about it. If random little old man didn't have a vending machine, what made him think people actually read a sign when there is food laying out? Now a days, I'd like to slap the occasional person that pulls something like that because we have vending machines for pay food, we have about 1 a month or so when free food just shows up. Why should I be expected to know if the free food has a hidden sign that says $1 each? If donuts come in, I don't expect someone to have a sign up that says $1 each next to them.
I fault a country that has long since forgotten what making a living is all about, and what building a community, and a nation, is all about.
I'm all about profit. Profit can be a good thing.. but profit is not always a good thing, and that is what so many have long since forgotten.
Profit is almost always "a good thing." It is the POV of who it is a good thing for though. Is the profit a good thing for the employees, consumers, middle managament, upper managenment, board members, or the government at different levels? I'm very mixed about the idea that profit should always or often be divided from "the rich" and given to "the poor" just because we are poor. I make about $28K and consider myself somewhere between upper poor and lower middle class. I don't believe the profit that folks like Bill Gates makes should be split up so that I could a piece of it. If Bill Gates wants to spend his money to improve his local PD or for cures for third world countries' health problems, that's his business. I and the many other "poor" shouldn't complain and try to get his and other rich folks taxes raised because we are envious of their wealth. (O.K. The greedy SOB part of me wants to say let's slap a 90% income tax on those that make $1 million or more a year so that I can have a car, have my home paid off, and other entertainment toys such as internet, cable and telecommunications paid for to keep me happy. I'm willing to work for my toys/life though rather than try to tax it out of others.)
When I asked what the difference was (they were priced the same), she explained that the high school binding is much stronger and is meant to last for a good seven-eight years of abuse, while the college binding is only designed to last for two years before it starts to fall apart. I was surprised, and I asked the salesperson why the college kids get the poorer binding. She explained that the college bookstores (though I'm sure the publishers love this as well) don't profit as well of used book sales, so they want books to have a short lifespan. It's easier when the book is falling apart for them to refuse buyback.
And it makes perfect sense. I remember a whole bunch of my textbooks that would really fall apart in a year's time back in college, and I always wondered why my high school books could take so much more abuse and still come out alright. My prob-stat book in particular was shedding pages faster than a balding man would shed hair. Just another way publishers are trying to screw students in the long run.
I still have all of my college text books in fairly good shape. I didn't buy all of them in good shape though so those don't still look like new. I was wondering if anyone knew the average expected lifespan of a $50-$100 book purchase. I know we consumers don't have much power in this, but it would be nice if some consumer rights group demanded that "expensive" books be designed to hold up over decades of use rather than 2-3 years of use. I'm sure part of it is how well the books are kept and if they are used on a daily basis. My college books haven't really been touched since college and they are still in the same shape. While in college, I usually opened/closed and paged through the books at least 3-5 times a week for a semester or two. Do we have any librarians here that know how long the usual library book usually lasts and what libraries demand the lifespan of the books be. I'd think libraries would be the only institution looking for long lifed books. Book Publishers could care less how long their product actually lasts.
The book is a sturdy hardback, designed for decades of use. I still use it occasionally, and I have a PhD in Physics. It's priced at $97 direct from Amazon, or "Used and new from $55" from Amazon's resellers. This is cheap for such a book.
Any student who thinks he/she can afford an iPod, but not a book like this, has got seriously screwed-up priorities.
I spent about $300 a semester on books. I kept nearly all of it on a just in case note. Though you are talking about keeping the main reference work in your field for decades that is respectable and understandable. What about composition I & II or World History, or American History, or World Lit or other gen ed classes like the PE/Health book? Do those things really need to cost $60-70 each? Basic science texts are the worst. Biology, Chemistry, Physics 101 texts are all $100. The good news is that they are genearlly 2 semester texts. The bad news is they aren't really designed for long term use or to be kept by the average college student. I believe that part of the college experience/education was collecting text books and building personal library. I'm not really thrilled with texts of Biology, Chemistry, or Physics in my home library, but I'm not about to rush out and spend $300 dollars picking out 3 replacement texts. I'd be willing to spend $25-45 on good long term books, but I don't have the income to book $100 books.
Ironically, the only complaint we regularly get about our classes is that the library is not helpful, even though we have bought literally hundreds of titles in the last couple of years. We now believe that most of our new students have never used a library before they come to the university, so we're going to actually show them how we go about learning new things using books. Not sure how we're going to do that!
You may not like hearing this. I only had to actually "use" a library twice in highschool. Once for some english paper when I was a senior that was basically look up all the facts on the field that you are interested in. The other was a biology paper that had to be 10 pages long and include 10 sources. In college, I think that I only that to use the library for 1 paper and that was mainly looking up info. for a professor for his paper. I did use the college library for a reference book every now and then. I can't say that I'm surprised that you are finding that alot of people "don't know" how to use the library. Most students have never "needed" to use the library. Of course we've always had 2-3 different "iibrary" education classes at different points, but that was just basic exerices in looking things up and was usually a 2-3 days out of an English class. We just didn't need to go to the library for any of our normal school work other than a quiet place to work. I actually think libraries are useful, but our current method of education doesn't require the student ever to use them so why should our students develop that skill?
You could also apply the same logic to writing papers. Students generally don't have to write papers so of course our skills and knowledge of writing researched papers are lacking. What we are shown is how to test out at multiple choice tests and the occasional fill in the blank test so the last 2 generations have basically been educated to fill out forms. I actually hated writing any form of paper, but I didn't have to do many of them. If I had to do one a week in junior high or high school, I'd still not like them, but I'd atleast be able to crank them out if needed.
If it's feasable that the US alone could go to mars, and that Russia and China together can go to mars - then could not all three work together to achieve this goal better? Or is it neccessary to have the "us" and "them" philosophy when it comes to these kinds of projects? Must there always be an adversary?
Yes, we are generally slow and stupid when we can get away with it. I bet you China/Russia would be 1/3 of the way to Mars before the US really makes a response, and then we'd try to one up them by rushing a Mars project and beating them there. Which China/Russia could care less about because we'd stop most of our space stuff after "proving" we were better/faster than China/Russia. While we ignore space, China/Russia would slowly and surely expand a space industry and we won't be able to just build a crash project to catch up.
How about industrial espionage? Ask Cisco, Nortel and Juniper how much Huawei gear violates their patents... Why spend when you can steal?
I love it when foreign patents don't apply to domestic products. The US and Europe really should adopt this IP process. It would foster innovation rather than slow or prevent it as the current US system does. We could apply the same tactics and just copy anything coming from an foreign country rather than paying out royalities/licensing to them. Multinational companies don't like this. Those that would like us to have a global government don't like that idea. Those that would like to speed "local" progress could careless about repecting "foreign" patents/IP/laws/culture.
So basically, I would reckon the study methodology and criteria were flawed. Asia has a much bigger ratio of Linux and Unix systems (and Lotus Notes as well, surprisingly) compared to the rest of the World. The much higher GDP and purchasing power distorts the study method.
Great, that'll mean that Asia will really be ahead of US in the long term.
It can be almost impossible to fire government employees, so they just accept that some of the people are going to goof off most of the time. These people rarely get promoted beyond a certain level and at least where I worked, the only people who ever got into management were the people who actually did real work.
Well, you get far enough and make enough money and then you start to slow down and goof off. There is nothing written in stone that says that we have to work 8 hours a day for our whole lives. I think that most people agree that 30 min. of goof off time is o.k. for the younger set, the older you get though and the closer that you get to retirement the more 2 hours of goof off time looks o.k. If you've worked in an agency that this was considered normal for the past 15-20 years, why change because of a handful of young ones want everyone rushing around "doing something" all the time? You'll get old and become a Wally at one point in life as well.;)
Often the same people will happily hand over their credit cards to be taken out the bank of a resturaunt, fax or phone cc details through to businesses or throw out printed receipts with their full details (and signature).
Why this obsession with HTTPS?
Because computers are evil so of course they are unsafe. Who would dream that just by swiping a cc at a gas station pump your card's data could be stolen? There have been organized rings that intercepted all the cc data of the "pay at the pump" info. You aren't any safer actually using the store, because the store manager or who ever setups the pay at the pump interception could intercept it within the store. This idea and tech could be used anywhere cc are used. You have to "trust" the vendor that you use if you are using a dishonest vendor your cc info is stolen/copied the moment it is used. The only thing that could stop this is one time use keys via smart cards (without the vendors being aware.) The moment a stolen one time use pad is reused, the credit card companies could come down like the wrath of God on the ID thief. I'm not for RIAA/MPAA having their private policies made into law, but I would almost gladly let credit card companies have their own merc forces to elminate ID thieves with extreme force. Heck, the country would almost be better off if the credit card companies removed all those that like to live in constant high interest debit.
On the other end of the spectrum, I'd like to see commodity game hardware.... all make game machines using a unified format rather than the silly overpriced hardware lockin we've got today... It might be technically feasible, but it doesn't fit with the current business plans.
Um, as far as I'm aware of consoles are already a commodity. It doesn't matter if we have 3 or 12 consoles to support. We've shown that the globe can easily handle 4-6 TV console formats and 2-3 hand held formats. PSP & DS are both thriving though DS is doing better. We currently have the options of GC, PS2, Xbox, or Wii, 360, PS3, or retro PS1, N64, Sega Dreamcast. Those last three nothing new is being made for them, but the format is still out there with millions of units installed. I'd bet a new game for each of the system could sell. The GC, PS2, XBox are nearing the end of their main stream life. They still have 2-3 good years of new games that they could easily support. Why should I buy any of the 3 new consoles when I could spend $300 on games instead? The smart publishers should be aiming at "the budget" shopper that will wait 2-3 years for "next-generation" systems to drop in price. They might not spend $400+ for new system, but they are likely to buy 2-3 games for $80 each year. I'm not of the mind that a "single format" made by 3+ vendors would be to the consumer's advantage. I know your logic would be that each of the vendors would have to met the spec, but they'd be selling against others. Well, there wouldn't be any reason except price for a consumer to pick one console platform over another. Maybe in another 10 years or so, but I don't think we are there yet. We've not reached a stable peak yet. I like the choice of 2-3 consoles per generation myself.
PC gamers see a division between the PC and consoles, as if all consoles can be lumped together. Console gamers see the PC as just another platform, with its own strengths, weaknesses and exclusive titles.
I play both. I think that consoles are much, much easier than PCs for ease of access and "instant" gaming. I've pretty much let my kids have run of the console. Its just stick the disk in and press power. Game starts within 5 secs with maybe a brief splash menu. My PC was about $2000 when new. I personally refuse to do any upgrades on my PC. I've been thinking if I could afford one of those $600-$800 laptops that they'll do most of what I'd like. PC gaming has always been a crap shoot as to if the games will even run properly on your given hardware. Some one stated that they'll buy a new $200-$300 that should handle all newer games except older games and they put in the example of Quake 3. Um, that's my reason right there way most people would just ignore PC gaming infavor of consoles. The only games that I play that slow my system down are SimCity 4 and Civ3 & 4. I only have 512MB of RAM. From what I've read, SimCity 4 will take all the RAM you can throw at it. I'm not going to run out and spend $150 for 2 Gbs of RAM for a single game. (I'd like to be able to do that, but my wife would kill me.) I can get way with buying an entire console system and not having to worry about additional hardware and knowing the games will be fun. I hate to say it, but SimCity 4 and Civ 4 do get "old" far too quick. The extra graphics seem to slow everything down. I'd guess that those 2 games have the most behind the scenes bookkeeping going on. Well, I didn't have to much trouble loading and running those games, but it did take atleast 20 minutes to install each game and it takes atleast 1.5-2 minutes before I actually get to play the game. I'll put up with it because its a PC game and I'll be playing it for 4-5 hours. I'd rather just click an icon and the game just start within 10-20 secs. That doesn't even happen if you have the lastest greatest computer and an older game. I put up with PC games, but they could learn a few lessons from their console cousins.
The price of a stock is determined by external factors, and the key into being a good investor is access to information: who sued who, what is the union planing, what product is the competition developing etc. So to replace humans with algorithms, you must make them as intelligent as humans in the basic task of finding and understanding information. AI is ages away from this stage, and when/if we will finally have such powerful AI, the stock exchange will be our last concern.
Nah, the AI should be smart enough to "keep invisible" from public notice, make use of the stock market and nearlly totally control the entire market within one or two human generations, have its own private merc forces just in case some one decides to try to take it out, and oh its own R&D lab/industry for making improvements. The AI would have no reason for taking over humanity if it could own nearly all human companies. It could then lobby and pick politicans that it would think would be best for us. After awhile it would just sit and watch. Maybe it would play SimEarth with us. We'd most likely never notice. There could be a handful of research R&D people that are the front people that the public sees with all the massive computers hidden from view. Would we even notice if Google's or Walmart's massive hardware became selfaware?
so will future astronomers look down on our current understanding of planets and moons and its basically useless emphasis on "what it orbits" as being more important than "what it is made of"
Nah, I'd predict it would be part of the history of the class and they'd show how that system was initally "ok" for a single solar system, or a hand full solar systems, but when studying hundreds or thousands of systems, scientists will come up with several classification schemes. I'm sure we'll try out 3-5 different systems in the future, but we need all those data points before we can start. If we spend a good time out in the Belt mining asteriods a whole system for classifying and naming asteriods will be born and revised several times over depending on how long we take mining it. That scheme may or may not work for what we think of as planets, but I'd bet it would be more useful to be adapted from than our existing what it orbits system. Actually, I'd think that you'd want to determine orbits for navigational reasons, and what is made of to determine if we need to go there. I don't like the idea of focusing all our attention on "Earthlike" planets for life. Oh, we'll find "our type" of life there sooner or later, but we may miss several other forms of life that didn't evolve from an Earthlike planet.
There's nothing worse than when rock geeks, and rocks in space geeks get into argument over vocabulary.;)
But, but we are in space. Therefore they are both rocks in space geeks. So they are all in the same field except one group is studying rocks that they can only look at via telescopes and the other group actually studies rocks that they they could use microscopes and other tools on. I find it odd that those that can only look aren't required to know more of the basics from those that study local rocks.
It really sounds as though the FBI needs a real IT department of their own, not the isolated geeks helping out Mulder and Scully. And, if some "CIO" type waddles in and recommends another outsourcing, maybe the sidearm arguement should be used.
Outsource, and this is what you get. They must hire MBA's. Really, sensitive government data projects like this one should never be outsourced, if only for national security reasons.
I'm kinda mixed. I think that the group that was responsible for NASAs space shuttle software and testing need to be incharge of an entire federal IT department. Although it sounds nice for the FBI to have its own IT group/division or what not, really all of the government needs those functions. The FBI should just budget 5-10 million a year toward the Federal IT division for writing/maintaining their software. I like to live in ideal land though. Ideally, everything the Feds would do would be secured and be written for https at a min. I would hope that our government could just write a check to yahoo, goggle, or hotmail for a webmail for the feds so that they could logon at mail.fbi.gov and send logged secure e-mail with certificates that the e-mail came from the fbi.gov. Really, how difficult is that do to? You don't need outlook, or an e-mail program, just keep it all in webmail and they should atleast have access to modern e-mail.
Theoretically they could possibly be even held legally liable by the government, it's not passed yet but look at Clinton & Liberman's "The Family Entertainment Protection Act", which would make it illegal to sell adult games to minors. (Clinton's made direct complaint's about Walmart's selling of games to minors, so they know they are the politician's crosshairs)
Oh yeah, there it is again why I voted for Bush rather than Gore. The more that I listened to Lieberman, the more that I reliazed that he wanted to remove the video game industry. I've been playing "violent" video games since before I was 12. The graphics have gotten better, but the stimulated violence has been the same. I'm not going to vote for some one that is making it a big part of his platform to change what I've happily been enjoying.
Joe Lieberman was with Bush on the war, and this was not only the democrats in his party telling him he was wrong on the war; 15,000 Connecticut voters switched parties from independent or republican, just so that they could tell Joe Lieberman to get lost...
Is that the same Lieberman that was Gore's running mate back in Bush vs Gore? You want to know why I went with Bush rather than Gore? I viewed Gore & Bush as middlemen with not enough to seperate them from each other. Then I noticed Gore's Lieberman. That guy wanted to censor video games. That was the issue that lost Gore a vote with me. I had nothing against Gore or Bush. Bush's running mate really didn't stand out other than "old military war horse been working in the oil industry." That was much better than want's to mess with my entertianment to appease his political masters. I've been sick and tired of everything terrorism related about a month after 9/11. If I had billions I'd buy media companies just to fire any one that tried to spread more of this "terrorism" nonsense. I'm not living in fear. I'm living with annoying idiots. I hope folks wake up and vote for a third party come the next election. Democrates and Republicans will both be playing the terror card for years to come just to get the idiot vote. I'll predict that we'll have some idiots that would like all airplane, train, and subway passages to be stripped naked before entering the transport and given minimal transportation clothing for the ride. We have people that stupid in this country that would vote for measures like that. We need to make sure it doesn't happen.
I think the unit builder was the worst of alpha centauri (but the rest was so good, i still love it most of all civs, which, uhm, means quite a bit because the others are so good. i especially like the way the factions are presented, the feel so much more real than those civ nations which barely differ more than in the face that presents them)
the problem i had with unit builder: the units do not really evolve over long periods of time, it's still "unarmoured buggy, n attack", with only n changing, same goes for the planes etc. in the end game there are all those really funky extras like drop pods and the new chassis, but imho they come way too late in the game.
btw: civ4 has "learned" the good parts of the unit builder, the promotions don't just make your units stronger but allow for special abilities which give even more interesting combinations than in SMAC, but at the instance level, not at the class level, if you allow the analogy. at the same time it is even less administrative work, because there are no bulk upgrades as in SMAC.
I'll agree and disagree with you about the unit builder. I disliked the promotions in Civ4, but that's just me. See I liked the bulk upgrades. I really wanted to do something like bulk upgrades for cities. Like build a granery in every city. The unit builder itself was pretty good to me. The things that I disliked about it was that it was sometime buggy in deleting units that you didn't want. And some combinations that you didn't want even in your menu. I didn't want any missles being created. Every time something new was researched 3 new missles were created. The promotions may be alot less complex than the unit builder, but to me its more one step forward three steps back. I don't like "getting to know" each one of my units. I like playing with an entire army of units. I want them to be the same. I don't want only one "experienced" trooper having special abilites. I wanted some special abilities that I choose standard across my army. I've always liked Civ to me the "bad" part of Civ4 was the IU. You had to click on individual units/cities to do get anything done. I like having an empire with many units and cities. I wanted to easily click on a class of units and upgrade the entire class rather than having to click on every freaking one of those units. Same for buying city improvements. I'd have loved easier methods of highlighting all cities and buying the same improvement throughout. I also have a like/ extreme hatred relationship with the governor. I know the governor is about the only management tool that they give you other than lining up the next 10 items in the build que. It is o.k. at what it does, but still very lacking. I guess I just need it to be alot more complicated to give me far more options than what it currently does.
Civ IV is vastly different than the previous Civ games... religion, improved culture, great people, no corruption, vastly more flexible diplomacy, the city maintence which eliminates "city rushing"... lots more cultures and increased differences in the cultures' abilities and units... revised seige unit rules...
Try Civ IV, it's great. Warlords expansion makes it even better.
You seemed to have liked it much more than I did. After playing Civ3 & Civ4, Civ4 just runs alot slower even in the early game with alot of flashy graphics. I've disliked Civs static tech tree for awhile. I don't know how they'd go about making a dynamic one, but playing with the same things over and over again (which were very, very similiar to all the previous Civs.) I guess my big dislike of Civ4 was that if you've played, Civ 1, Civ2, Civ3, Alpha Cent, SimCity 1,2,3&4, and MOO2&3. Well Civ4 seemed like it wasn't adding any thing new except refining things so people that haven't been Civ fans could play and "get into" the game. It seemed to be aimed more towards my wife than me. You liked the city maintence and no "city rushing." I wanted a better way to overall "rush" entire regions if you had either the production or money to do it. I hated how you could barely buy any city improvements till near last end of the game. You had to kill off population in almost every form of government except democracies with capitalism. Just because the USSR didn't implement communism well, doesn't mean that I couldn't build by own facist communist government that could "rush" things without killing off people. I know we like capitalistic democracies, but that doesn't mean in a game world that we should be limited to only that as the best outcome.
In the past. Now, instead of trying to rob the best and brightest from other countries, we're robbing our southern neighbor of tens of millions of uneducated, unskilled people who can't (and won't) speak the language here.
Pretty soon, the best and brightest will be looking for a different country to migrate to. Perhaps Australia; they have a very strict immigration system that only lets in people they think will be an asset to the country.
I don't mind "undereducated" foreigners from down south coming into the country. It doesn't help us with R&D helping improve average education level, but it does give us a slight buffer of internal "cheap" labor so that won't be quite so dependent on China. I'm not for strict immigration. You shouldn't hold up Australia as a beacon of goodness. They could have most of SouthEast Asia's best and brightest flock to the country if it wasn't for their old "white Australia" policy. The US wasn't any better in the past. Mexico would have been a US state if the US hadn't been so racist and only wanted a "white Christian" government. They didn't want to make all those native americans/spanish folk as well become citizens of the US. We could have avoided most of these "immigration" problems had we just made Mexico a part of the US. We'd have built up Mexico and then Mexico would have an immigration problem with people trying to cross their southern border.
After realising how much I missed it, I bought Populous second hand a few months ago. What makes it so good is that it has everything a good real-time strategy game should, and nothing more. If only someone were to remake it on modern hardware, with photo-realistic castles and fluid water, but no changes whatsoever to the gameplay, I'd buy it in an instant.
I think the only 2 of his games that I've played were Populous on the SNES I think and Dungeon Keeper. Populous on the SNES could have used some work. I could see how it would have been much better on the computer though. I don't mind some minor changes other than updating graphics and the engine. I don't like series that tend to stick too closely to the status quo. My thought on that is the Civ series. Other than updated graphics and engine, there wasn't much new other than culture was added in Civ3. My biggest dislike of the Civ series was always Alpha Centuria was released before Civ 3 and its tech engine and unit builder made anything in Civ feel dated. The Civ series should have had a unit builder. You should have been able to choose which animals to domesitic and breed different riding animals other than just elephants and horses. (You should have been able to ride big cats or train war bears or maybe even ride cows/bulls into battle.) Other thing is mixing and matching weapons. If I want tigers pulling my chariots and shooting fire arrows, I should be able to train and build the units. Well enough of my Civ rants.
I'll need to dig up a copy of populous. It was a cross between an early age of empires and a regional sim earth with a computer god to play against. Now that I think about it, an updated Populous could make an awesome multiplayer game or maybe even an online game. You'd just start everyone off with a single hut and villager and go from there playing against others. You could have a polythesic religion where you let allies villagers into your turf or maybe spread religion around like Civ culture a bit. Or you could be monothesic where if they were of a different religion your followers would automatically kill or injure villagers of another religion.
If we couldn't brain drain scientists from other countries, we'd probably still be living in caves.
I just don't get it. What is the deal with people never changing their minds, or letting in new information? Most people aren't stupid...I'm sure the average person in Iceland isn't any smarter than the average american (Kansas excluded).
I'll disagree with you. People are stupid. The US general population may tend to be more more stupid than others. It isn't even the uneducated that's the problem. I've met educated teachers and professors that teach the subject, but then will state to the class that they don't personally believe that's how it is, that they're only teaching because its required by law. With an attitude like that, of course a good chunk of our population won't believe. If the teachers say things like that, it doesn't matter what religion most of the students are, they'll have doubts that its a valid theory because their teacher "doesn't believe it." If it wasn't for bringing all of that European Weapon's Tech over, those Indians/Native Americans would have kicked those colonists back to Europe. Most of our US culture has always been anti-science, but not production and this pre-dates the whole evolution bit. We'll slightly improve what others build first or rollout something across the country that some other country considers is still in the prototype stage. It's like we refuse to have a pro-science mindset. Our mindset has been production, refining production processes and lately athletics. Our best R&D skill is robbing other countries of their best and brightest. I guess that I shouldn't knock it. It's worked very well for us.
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It's the massive, extreme inequalities on the scale of 1,000,000:1 that result in massive-scale poverty that I have a problem with, because society is supposed to be for the benefit of everyone - it's why we build them. We're supposed to make a living together. It's the "profit at all costs" motive that erases that benefit and begins to benefit the few at the great expense of the many.
I've always had the idea that I'd like to personally say where my tax money goes. Well I don't pay the government enough for me to personally divide up my money myself. I think that those like Bill Gates or anyone that pays more than $100K a year in taxes should be able to directly spend their "tax money" on the public projects that they want their money spent on. It makes sense at an individual level. I doubt the same idea would work for companies or industries for them to directly funnel their tax money into government programs that their company sees as needing funding. I wonder what kinda of results that would have. Most industries would spend their tax money on public government projects that made us of their industry or company. I wonder if it could work.
It could also serve to explain some of the executive stealing too. I've noticed year round as I talk to executives, they frequently seem to have some sort of food available for people to grab and much on, usually provided or acquired by their administrative assistant. An executive is more likely to be used to random cookies/bagels/muffins/whatever to magically appear for free consumption than us peons at the bottom.
.5-$1 each once a week or so. Every now and then, one of the bosses would buy all the bread products and just give them to everyone that happened to be around the main office. (Said little old lady did not leave her products out unattended, she stood their and sold them.) I'll agree with both. If food just shows up, most people assume that it is a free gift, or some one had a pot luck or something. The more high income a profession the more this happens without anyone thinking about it. If random little old man didn't have a vending machine, what made him think people actually read a sign when there is food laying out? Now a days, I'd like to slap the occasional person that pulls something like that because we have vending machines for pay food, we have about 1 a month or so when free food just shows up. Why should I be expected to know if the free food has a hidden sign that says $1 each? If donuts come in, I don't expect someone to have a sign up that says $1 each next to them.
Just putting forth an alternative explanation.
When I worked with my dad, there was this little old lady that came by selling bread products from
I fault a country that has long since forgotten what making a living is all about, and what building a community, and a nation, is all about.
I'm all about profit. Profit can be a good thing.. but profit is not always a good thing, and that is what so many have long since forgotten.
Profit is almost always "a good thing." It is the POV of who it is a good thing for though. Is the profit a good thing for the employees, consumers, middle managament, upper managenment, board members, or the government at different levels? I'm very mixed about the idea that profit should always or often be divided from "the rich" and given to "the poor" just because we are poor. I make about $28K and consider myself somewhere between upper poor and lower middle class. I don't believe the profit that folks like Bill Gates makes should be split up so that I could a piece of it. If Bill Gates wants to spend his money to improve his local PD or for cures for third world countries' health problems, that's his business. I and the many other "poor" shouldn't complain and try to get his and other rich folks taxes raised because we are envious of their wealth. (O.K. The greedy SOB part of me wants to say let's slap a 90% income tax on those that make $1 million or more a year so that I can have a car, have my home paid off, and other entertainment toys such as internet, cable and telecommunications paid for to keep me happy. I'm willing to work for my toys/life though rather than try to tax it out of others.)
When I asked what the difference was (they were priced the same), she explained that the high school binding is much stronger and is meant to last for a good seven-eight years of abuse, while the college binding is only designed to last for two years before it starts to fall apart. I was surprised, and I asked the salesperson why the college kids get the poorer binding. She explained that the college bookstores (though I'm sure the publishers love this as well) don't profit as well of used book sales, so they want books to have a short lifespan. It's easier when the book is falling apart for them to refuse buyback.
And it makes perfect sense. I remember a whole bunch of my textbooks that would really fall apart in a year's time back in college, and I always wondered why my high school books could take so much more abuse and still come out alright. My prob-stat book in particular was shedding pages faster than a balding man would shed hair. Just another way publishers are trying to screw students in the long run.
I still have all of my college text books in fairly good shape. I didn't buy all of them in good shape though so those don't still look like new. I was wondering if anyone knew the average expected lifespan of a $50-$100 book purchase. I know we consumers don't have much power in this, but it would be nice if some consumer rights group demanded that "expensive" books be designed to hold up over decades of use rather than 2-3 years of use. I'm sure part of it is how well the books are kept and if they are used on a daily basis. My college books haven't really been touched since college and they are still in the same shape. While in college, I usually opened/closed and paged through the books at least 3-5 times a week for a semester or two. Do we have any librarians here that know how long the usual library book usually lasts and what libraries demand the lifespan of the books be. I'd think libraries would be the only institution looking for long lifed books. Book Publishers could care less how long their product actually lasts.
The book is a sturdy hardback, designed for decades of use. I still use it occasionally, and I have a PhD in Physics. It's priced at $97 direct from Amazon, or "Used and new from $55" from Amazon's resellers. This is cheap for such a book.
Any student who thinks he/she can afford an iPod, but not a book like this, has got seriously screwed-up priorities.
I spent about $300 a semester on books. I kept nearly all of it on a just in case note. Though you are talking about keeping the main reference work in your field for decades that is respectable and understandable. What about composition I & II or World History, or American History, or World Lit or other gen ed classes like the PE/Health book? Do those things really need to cost $60-70 each? Basic science texts are the worst. Biology, Chemistry, Physics 101 texts are all $100. The good news is that they are genearlly 2 semester texts. The bad news is they aren't really designed for long term use or to be kept by the average college student. I believe that part of the college experience/education was collecting text books and building personal library. I'm not really thrilled with texts of Biology, Chemistry, or Physics in my home library, but I'm not about to rush out and spend $300 dollars picking out 3 replacement texts. I'd be willing to spend $25-45 on good long term books, but I don't have the income to book $100 books.
Ironically, the only complaint we regularly get about our classes is that the library is not helpful, even though we have bought literally hundreds of titles in the last couple of years. We now believe that most of our new students have never used a library before they come to the university, so we're going to actually show them how we go about learning new things using books. Not sure how we're going to do that!
You may not like hearing this. I only had to actually "use" a library twice in highschool. Once for some english paper when I was a senior that was basically look up all the facts on the field that you are interested in. The other was a biology paper that had to be 10 pages long and include 10 sources. In college, I think that I only that to use the library for 1 paper and that was mainly looking up info. for a professor for his paper. I did use the college library for a reference book every now and then. I can't say that I'm surprised that you are finding that alot of people "don't know" how to use the library. Most students have never "needed" to use the library. Of course we've always had 2-3 different "iibrary" education classes at different points, but that was just basic exerices in looking things up and was usually a 2-3 days out of an English class. We just didn't need to go to the library for any of our normal school work other than a quiet place to work. I actually think libraries are useful, but our current method of education doesn't require the student ever to use them so why should our students develop that skill?
You could also apply the same logic to writing papers. Students generally don't have to write papers so of course our skills and knowledge of writing researched papers are lacking. What we are shown is how to test out at multiple choice tests and the occasional fill in the blank test so the last 2 generations have basically been educated to fill out forms. I actually hated writing any form of paper, but I didn't have to do many of them. If I had to do one a week in junior high or high school, I'd still not like them, but I'd atleast be able to crank them out if needed.
If it's feasable that the US alone could go to mars, and that Russia and China together can go to mars - then could not all three work together to achieve this goal better?
Or is it neccessary to have the "us" and "them" philosophy when it comes to these kinds of projects?
Must there always be an adversary?
Yes, we are generally slow and stupid when we can get away with it. I bet you China/Russia would be 1/3 of the way to Mars before the US really makes a response, and then we'd try to one up them by rushing a Mars project and beating them there. Which China/Russia could care less about because we'd stop most of our space stuff after "proving" we were better/faster than China/Russia. While we ignore space, China/Russia would slowly and surely expand a space industry and we won't be able to just build a crash project to catch up.
How about industrial espionage? Ask Cisco, Nortel and Juniper how much Huawei gear violates their patents...
Why spend when you can steal?
I love it when foreign patents don't apply to domestic products. The US and Europe really should adopt this IP process. It would foster innovation rather than slow or prevent it as the current US system does. We could apply the same tactics and just copy anything coming from an foreign country rather than paying out royalities/licensing to them. Multinational companies don't like this. Those that would like us to have a global government don't like that idea. Those that would like to speed "local" progress could careless about repecting "foreign" patents/IP/laws/culture.
So basically, I would reckon the study methodology and criteria were flawed. Asia has a much bigger ratio of Linux and Unix systems (and Lotus Notes as well, surprisingly) compared to the rest of the World. The much higher GDP and purchasing power distorts the study method.
Great, that'll mean that Asia will really be ahead of US in the long term.
TFA goes on and on about all the people on the team and the work they did, and that's great. So, what's with the headline and summary?
/. that's all you really need to know about that. /. headlines seem to hardly ever have anything to do with the actual facts of the article.
It's
It can be almost impossible to fire government employees, so they just accept that some of the people are going to goof off most of the time. These people rarely get promoted beyond a certain level and at least where I worked, the only people who ever got into management were the people who actually did real work.
;)
Well, you get far enough and make enough money and then you start to slow down and goof off. There is nothing written in stone that says that we have to work 8 hours a day for our whole lives. I think that most people agree that 30 min. of goof off time is o.k. for the younger set, the older you get though and the closer that you get to retirement the more 2 hours of goof off time looks o.k. If you've worked in an agency that this was considered normal for the past 15-20 years, why change because of a handful of young ones want everyone rushing around "doing something" all the time? You'll get old and become a Wally at one point in life as well.
Often the same people will happily hand over their credit cards to be taken out the bank of a resturaunt, fax or phone cc details through to businesses or throw out printed receipts with their full details (and signature).
Why this obsession with HTTPS?
Because computers are evil so of course they are unsafe. Who would dream that just by swiping a cc at a gas station pump your card's data could be stolen? There have been organized rings that intercepted all the cc data of the "pay at the pump" info. You aren't any safer actually using the store, because the store manager or who ever setups the pay at the pump interception could intercept it within the store. This idea and tech could be used anywhere cc are used. You have to "trust" the vendor that you use if you are using a dishonest vendor your cc info is stolen/copied the moment it is used. The only thing that could stop this is one time use keys via smart cards (without the vendors being aware.) The moment a stolen one time use pad is reused, the credit card companies could come down like the wrath of God on the ID thief. I'm not for RIAA/MPAA having their private policies made into law, but I would almost gladly let credit card companies have their own merc forces to elminate ID thieves with extreme force. Heck, the country would almost be better off if the credit card companies removed all those that like to live in constant high interest debit.
On the other end of the spectrum, I'd like to see commodity game hardware. ... all make game machines using a unified format rather than the silly overpriced hardware lockin we've got today ... It might be technically feasible, but it doesn't fit with the current business plans.
Um, as far as I'm aware of consoles are already a commodity. It doesn't matter if we have 3 or 12 consoles to support. We've shown that the globe can easily handle 4-6 TV console formats and 2-3 hand held formats. PSP & DS are both thriving though DS is doing better. We currently have the options of GC, PS2, Xbox, or Wii, 360, PS3, or retro PS1, N64, Sega Dreamcast. Those last three nothing new is being made for them, but the format is still out there with millions of units installed. I'd bet a new game for each of the system could sell. The GC, PS2, XBox are nearing the end of their main stream life. They still have 2-3 good years of new games that they could easily support. Why should I buy any of the 3 new consoles when I could spend $300 on games instead? The smart publishers should be aiming at "the budget" shopper that will wait 2-3 years for "next-generation" systems to drop in price. They might not spend $400+ for new system, but they are likely to buy 2-3 games for $80 each year. I'm not of the mind that a "single format" made by 3+ vendors would be to the consumer's advantage. I know your logic would be that each of the vendors would have to met the spec, but they'd be selling against others. Well, there wouldn't be any reason except price for a consumer to pick one console platform over another. Maybe in another 10 years or so, but I don't think we are there yet. We've not reached a stable peak yet. I like the choice of 2-3 consoles per generation myself.
PC gamers see a division between the PC and consoles, as if all consoles can be lumped together. Console gamers see the PC as just another platform, with its own strengths, weaknesses and exclusive titles.
I play both. I think that consoles are much, much easier than PCs for ease of access and "instant" gaming. I've pretty much let my kids have run of the console. Its just stick the disk in and press power. Game starts within 5 secs with maybe a brief splash menu. My PC was about $2000 when new. I personally refuse to do any upgrades on my PC. I've been thinking if I could afford one of those $600-$800 laptops that they'll do most of what I'd like. PC gaming has always been a crap shoot as to if the games will even run properly on your given hardware. Some one stated that they'll buy a new $200-$300 that should handle all newer games except older games and they put in the example of Quake 3. Um, that's my reason right there way most people would just ignore PC gaming infavor of consoles. The only games that I play that slow my system down are SimCity 4 and Civ3 & 4. I only have 512MB of RAM. From what I've read, SimCity 4 will take all the RAM you can throw at it. I'm not going to run out and spend $150 for 2 Gbs of RAM for a single game. (I'd like to be able to do that, but my wife would kill me.) I can get way with buying an entire console system and not having to worry about additional hardware and knowing the games will be fun. I hate to say it, but SimCity 4 and Civ 4 do get "old" far too quick. The extra graphics seem to slow everything down. I'd guess that those 2 games have the most behind the scenes bookkeeping going on. Well, I didn't have to much trouble loading and running those games, but it did take atleast 20 minutes to install each game and it takes atleast 1.5-2 minutes before I actually get to play the game. I'll put up with it because its a PC game and I'll be playing it for 4-5 hours. I'd rather just click an icon and the game just start within 10-20 secs. That doesn't even happen if you have the lastest greatest computer and an older game. I put up with PC games, but they could learn a few lessons from their console cousins.
The price of a stock is determined by external factors, and the key into being a good investor is access to information: who sued who, what is the union planing, what product is the competition developing etc. So to replace humans with algorithms, you must make them as intelligent as humans in the basic task of finding and understanding information. AI is ages away from this stage, and when/if we will finally have such powerful AI, the stock exchange will be our last concern.
Nah, the AI should be smart enough to "keep invisible" from public notice, make use of the stock market and nearlly totally control the entire market within one or two human generations, have its own private merc forces just in case some one decides to try to take it out, and oh its own R&D lab/industry for making improvements. The AI would have no reason for taking over humanity if it could own nearly all human companies. It could then lobby and pick politicans that it would think would be best for us. After awhile it would just sit and watch. Maybe it would play SimEarth with us. We'd most likely never notice. There could be a handful of research R&D people that are the front people that the public sees with all the massive computers hidden from view. Would we even notice if Google's or Walmart's massive hardware became selfaware?
so will future astronomers look down on our current understanding of planets and moons and its basically useless emphasis on "what it orbits" as being more important than "what it is made of"
Nah, I'd predict it would be part of the history of the class and they'd show how that system was initally "ok" for a single solar system, or a hand full solar systems, but when studying hundreds or thousands of systems, scientists will come up with several classification schemes. I'm sure we'll try out 3-5 different systems in the future, but we need all those data points before we can start. If we spend a good time out in the Belt mining asteriods a whole system for classifying and naming asteriods will be born and revised several times over depending on how long we take mining it. That scheme may or may not work for what we think of as planets, but I'd bet it would be more useful to be adapted from than our existing what it orbits system. Actually, I'd think that you'd want to determine orbits for navigational reasons, and what is made of to determine if we need to go there. I don't like the idea of focusing all our attention on "Earthlike" planets for life. Oh, we'll find "our type" of life there sooner or later, but we may miss several other forms of life that didn't evolve from an Earthlike planet.
There's nothing worse than when rock geeks, and rocks in space geeks get into argument over vocabulary. ;)
But, but we are in space. Therefore they are both rocks in space geeks. So they are all in the same field except one group is studying rocks that they can only look at via telescopes and the other group actually studies rocks that they they could use microscopes and other tools on. I find it odd that those that can only look aren't required to know more of the basics from those that study local rocks.
It really sounds as though the FBI needs a real IT department of their own, not the isolated geeks helping out Mulder and Scully. And, if some "CIO" type waddles in and recommends another outsourcing, maybe the sidearm arguement should be used.
Outsource, and this is what you get. They must hire MBA's. Really, sensitive government data projects like this one should never be outsourced, if only for national security reasons.
I'm kinda mixed. I think that the group that was responsible for NASAs space shuttle software and testing need to be incharge of an entire federal IT department. Although it sounds nice for the FBI to have its own IT group/division or what not, really all of the government needs those functions. The FBI should just budget 5-10 million a year toward the Federal IT division for writing/maintaining their software. I like to live in ideal land though. Ideally, everything the Feds would do would be secured and be written for https at a min. I would hope that our government could just write a check to yahoo, goggle, or hotmail for a webmail for the feds so that they could logon at mail.fbi.gov and send logged secure e-mail with certificates that the e-mail came from the fbi.gov. Really, how difficult is that do to? You don't need outlook, or an e-mail program, just keep it all in webmail and they should atleast have access to modern e-mail.
Theoretically they could possibly be even held legally liable by the government, it's not passed yet but look at Clinton & Liberman's "The Family Entertainment Protection Act", which would make it illegal to sell adult games to minors. (Clinton's made direct complaint's about Walmart's selling of games to minors, so they know they are the politician's crosshairs)
Oh yeah, there it is again why I voted for Bush rather than Gore. The more that I listened to Lieberman, the more that I reliazed that he wanted to remove the video game industry. I've been playing "violent" video games since before I was 12. The graphics have gotten better, but the stimulated violence has been the same. I'm not going to vote for some one that is making it a big part of his platform to change what I've happily been enjoying.
Joe Lieberman was with Bush on the war, and this was not only the democrats in his party telling him he was wrong on the war; 15,000 Connecticut voters switched parties from independent or republican, just so that they could tell Joe Lieberman to get lost...
Is that the same Lieberman that was Gore's running mate back in Bush vs Gore? You want to know why I went with Bush rather than Gore? I viewed Gore & Bush as middlemen with not enough to seperate them from each other. Then I noticed Gore's Lieberman. That guy wanted to censor video games. That was the issue that lost Gore a vote with me. I had nothing against Gore or Bush. Bush's running mate really didn't stand out other than "old military war horse been working in the oil industry." That was much better than want's to mess with my entertianment to appease his political masters. I've been sick and tired of everything terrorism related about a month after 9/11. If I had billions I'd buy media companies just to fire any one that tried to spread more of this "terrorism" nonsense. I'm not living in fear. I'm living with annoying idiots. I hope folks wake up and vote for a third party come the next election. Democrates and Republicans will both be playing the terror card for years to come just to get the idiot vote. I'll predict that we'll have some idiots that would like all airplane, train, and subway passages to be stripped naked before entering the transport and given minimal transportation clothing for the ride. We have people that stupid in this country that would vote for measures like that. We need to make sure it doesn't happen.
I think the unit builder was the worst of alpha centauri (but the rest was so good, i still love it most of all civs, which, uhm, means quite a bit because the others are so good. i especially like the way the factions are presented, the feel so much more real than those civ nations which barely differ more than in the face that presents them)
the problem i had with unit builder: the units do not really evolve over long periods of time, it's still "unarmoured buggy, n attack", with only n changing, same goes for the planes etc. in the end game there are all those really funky extras like drop pods and the new chassis, but imho they come way too late in the game.
btw: civ4 has "learned" the good parts of the unit builder, the promotions don't just make your units stronger but allow for special abilities which give even more interesting combinations than in SMAC, but at the instance level, not at the class level, if you allow the analogy. at the same time it is even less administrative work, because there are no bulk upgrades as in SMAC.
I'll agree and disagree with you about the unit builder. I disliked the promotions in Civ4, but that's just me. See I liked the bulk upgrades. I really wanted to do something like bulk upgrades for cities. Like build a granery in every city. The unit builder itself was pretty good to me. The things that I disliked about it was that it was sometime buggy in deleting units that you didn't want. And some combinations that you didn't want even in your menu. I didn't want any missles being created. Every time something new was researched 3 new missles were created. The promotions may be alot less complex than the unit builder, but to me its more one step forward three steps back. I don't like "getting to know" each one of my units. I like playing with an entire army of units. I want them to be the same. I don't want only one "experienced" trooper having special abilites. I wanted some special abilities that I choose standard across my army. I've always liked Civ to me the "bad" part of Civ4 was the IU. You had to click on individual units/cities to do get anything done. I like having an empire with many units and cities. I wanted to easily click on a class of units and upgrade the entire class rather than having to click on every freaking one of those units. Same for buying city improvements. I'd have loved easier methods of highlighting all cities and buying the same improvement throughout. I also have a like/ extreme hatred relationship with the governor. I know the governor is about the only management tool that they give you other than lining up the next 10 items in the build que. It is o.k. at what it does, but still very lacking. I guess I just need it to be alot more complicated to give me far more options than what it currently does.
Civ IV is vastly different than the previous Civ games... religion, improved culture, great people, no corruption, vastly more flexible diplomacy, the city maintence which eliminates "city rushing"... lots more cultures and increased differences in the cultures' abilities and units... revised seige unit rules...
Try Civ IV, it's great. Warlords expansion makes it even better.
You seemed to have liked it much more than I did. After playing Civ3 & Civ4, Civ4 just runs alot slower even in the early game with alot of flashy graphics. I've disliked Civs static tech tree for awhile. I don't know how they'd go about making a dynamic one, but playing with the same things over and over again (which were very, very similiar to all the previous Civs.) I guess my big dislike of Civ4 was that if you've played, Civ 1, Civ2, Civ3, Alpha Cent, SimCity 1,2,3&4, and MOO2&3. Well Civ4 seemed like it wasn't adding any thing new except refining things so people that haven't been Civ fans could play and "get into" the game. It seemed to be aimed more towards my wife than me. You liked the city maintence and no "city rushing." I wanted a better way to overall "rush" entire regions if you had either the production or money to do it. I hated how you could barely buy any city improvements till near last end of the game. You had to kill off population in almost every form of government except democracies with capitalism. Just because the USSR didn't implement communism well, doesn't mean that I couldn't build by own facist communist government that could "rush" things without killing off people. I know we like capitalistic democracies, but that doesn't mean in a game world that we should be limited to only that as the best outcome.
In the past. Now, instead of trying to rob the best and brightest from other countries, we're robbing our southern neighbor of tens of millions of uneducated, unskilled people who can't (and won't) speak the language here.
Pretty soon, the best and brightest will be looking for a different country to migrate to. Perhaps Australia; they have a very strict immigration system that only lets in people they think will be an asset to the country.
I don't mind "undereducated" foreigners from down south coming into the country. It doesn't help us with R&D helping improve average education level, but it does give us a slight buffer of internal "cheap" labor so that won't be quite so dependent on China. I'm not for strict immigration. You shouldn't hold up Australia as a beacon of goodness. They could have most of SouthEast Asia's best and brightest flock to the country if it wasn't for their old "white Australia" policy. The US wasn't any better in the past. Mexico would have been a US state if the US hadn't been so racist and only wanted a "white Christian" government. They didn't want to make all those native americans/spanish folk as well become citizens of the US. We could have avoided most of these "immigration" problems had we just made Mexico a part of the US. We'd have built up Mexico and then Mexico would have an immigration problem with people trying to cross their southern border.
After realising how much I missed it, I bought Populous second hand a few months ago. What makes it so good is that it has everything a good real-time strategy game should, and nothing more. If only someone were to remake it on modern hardware, with photo-realistic castles and fluid water, but no changes whatsoever to the gameplay, I'd buy it in an instant.
I think the only 2 of his games that I've played were Populous on the SNES I think and Dungeon Keeper. Populous on the SNES could have used some work. I could see how it would have been much better on the computer though. I don't mind some minor changes other than updating graphics and the engine. I don't like series that tend to stick too closely to the status quo. My thought on that is the Civ series. Other than updated graphics and engine, there wasn't much new other than culture was added in Civ3. My biggest dislike of the Civ series was always Alpha Centuria was released before Civ 3 and its tech engine and unit builder made anything in Civ feel dated. The Civ series should have had a unit builder. You should have been able to choose which animals to domesitic and breed different riding animals other than just elephants and horses. (You should have been able to ride big cats or train war bears or maybe even ride cows/bulls into battle.) Other thing is mixing and matching weapons. If I want tigers pulling my chariots and shooting fire arrows, I should be able to train and build the units. Well enough of my Civ rants.
I'll need to dig up a copy of populous. It was a cross between an early age of empires and a regional sim earth with a computer god to play against. Now that I think about it, an updated Populous could make an awesome multiplayer game or maybe even an online game. You'd just start everyone off with a single hut and villager and go from there playing against others. You could have a polythesic religion where you let allies villagers into your turf or maybe spread religion around like Civ culture a bit. Or you could be monothesic where if they were of a different religion your followers would automatically kill or injure villagers of another religion.
If we couldn't brain drain scientists from other countries, we'd probably still be living in caves.
I just don't get it. What is the deal with people never changing their minds, or letting in new information? Most people aren't stupid...I'm sure the average person in Iceland isn't any smarter than the average american (Kansas excluded).
I'll disagree with you. People are stupid. The US general population may tend to be more more stupid than others. It isn't even the uneducated that's the problem. I've met educated teachers and professors that teach the subject, but then will state to the class that they don't personally believe that's how it is, that they're only teaching because its required by law. With an attitude like that, of course a good chunk of our population won't believe. If the teachers say things like that, it doesn't matter what religion most of the students are, they'll have doubts that its a valid theory because their teacher "doesn't believe it." If it wasn't for bringing all of that European Weapon's Tech over, those Indians/Native Americans would have kicked those colonists back to Europe. Most of our US culture has always been anti-science, but not production and this pre-dates the whole evolution bit. We'll slightly improve what others build first or rollout something across the country that some other country considers is still in the prototype stage. It's like we refuse to have a pro-science mindset. Our mindset has been production, refining production processes and lately athletics. Our best R&D skill is robbing other countries of their best and brightest. I guess that I shouldn't knock it. It's worked very well for us.