Agreed. "Sword of the Starts", however, is a nice throwback to slider style planetary management, though it's more in the vein of "Spaceward Ho" than "Master of Orion".
The only reason why the Cold War was so terrible was that the USA and the USSR were both waiting for the other to attack. Since neither one liked each other much (for both idealogical and practical reasons) the chance that an armed conflict would happen between the two powers was pretty darn high. Except that an armed conflict might precipitate into a nuclear war should either side feel backed into a corner.
You are misinformed about how close and how often the US and USSR came to nuclear exchange, and at the very real strategic possibility that first strike was the safest option, and at the political strength of it's proponents. This is beside the near-missed accidental launches that happened on both sides several times.
You probably are also not aware of how far the nuclear situation has deteriorated since the end of the cold war.
Your Panglossian view of Nukes and MAD, which is probably representative of a broad swath of people who would rather not think about this world of terror, will lead us right towards nuclear war.
Thus the reason why the US didn't win Vietnam. The chance of starting a nuclear war was too great to risk pressing the war to a conclusion. Which raised the (very legitimate) question of why we were even in the conflict to begin with.
Where the hell did you get this idea? What could we possibly have done to Vietnam that would have caused a nuclear attack from the communists? If we'd turned Vietnam into glass ourselves, a long shot but maybe. Even so, that outcome even without retaliation would have been much worse than the one we got.
"Signs" is Shamalayan poking fun, pretty crudely I'd say, at the tendency in movies and all fiction for each plot event to have a reason. In a telling scene towards the end, the main characters are listening to a radio report about another family that was completely wiped out by the aliens. BTW, I thought Vonnegut did it better in "Breakfast of Champions."
"Unbreakable" was a nice twist on the super hero plot. Not only is the "The Villain creates Hero" cliche taken to a suitably horrifying extreme, but the hero does not defeat, could not possibly have defeated the villain in time to save any of his victims.
Until we start looking at warfare on an interplanetary or interstellar scale, our existing nukes and possible antimatter warheads are going to sit in their silos and go unused.
Nukes have already been used, and do to dangerous attitudes like yours, which seem to proliferate as more time passes since the last use, they are likely to be used again.
We're about to cleanly clear a natural selection hurdle in a way that preserves diversity (i.e. evolutionary strength of the species), and you assholes would have us pull up, go back around, lower our heads and run straight at the hurdle. Brilliant.
"they also said the constitution isn't a suicide pact."
I don't think anyone as long ago as the founders said this, and it's a detestable sentiment since it cheapens the sacrifice of those who gave their lives in service to the Constitution.
Latent is the wrong word for Sim Life genes since all organism were haploid. What really happened was that the genetic space was so small, turn frequency being determined by a variable with four or five possible values, that it was pretty likely you'd get whatever turn frequency you'd want in a few generations.
Voiceover: Elitist liberals complain that John McCain doesn't know how many houses he owns.
[A Monopoly board. Houses, hotels, and Monopoly money and Chance cards ("?") spill onto it in slow motion.]
Voiceover: Who can keep track? They don't teach fancy slide-rule calculus in POW camps. John McCain may not know how many mansions he has, but he knows how many books he has.
[An empty bookshelf, covered with cobwebs. McCain walks by, holding a familiar black book.]
A captcha is a variant on the Turing test where the judge is another computer. Spammers have defeated captchas far more difficult than scrambled inner letters, but it's a problem far beyond the sophistication of most chatbots.
I'd put it down to a difference in economic incentive.
It's not that the mutants survive, it's that everyone survives, so there's no basis for any one mutant having a better chance of survival. Which means we'll just have a lot of mutants.
This is a good thing. Mutants mean diversity, and diversity means a higher likely hood of some type of humans surviving hard times.
Idiocracy is an example of how humanity could (or already has) evolved in a direction we probably don't want
The premise of Idiocracy is not any kind of diversity trend, but a selection trend: widespread effective birth control which only stupid lazy people wouldn't use.
The MAD scenario is a major selection event.
At the top of your post you lament the lack of selection among humans, suggesting this leads to aimlessness of human evolution (a nonsense notion anyway), then derive from this three possible futures, two of which are nightmare scenarios, the same two that posit heavy selection among humans.
I blame the Darwin awards for glorifying selection as a process to remove genetic chaff. Selection doesn't do any good for the species as a whole. People selected against by one selection process, like smart people through birth control, might be useful to have around for some other future challenge.
Medicine, which increases diversity, should be applauded. Eugenics, which would decrease diversity through selection, should be fought.
You could definitely frame it that way, but it gets less convincing each time she reminds him that the subject is Spain, not Latin America. By the end of it, it's clear that McCain could not or would not pay attention to what she was saying.
John McCain, you've voted for a law to legalize torture for suspected enemy combatants. Do you regret that decision? Does your decision imply that the actions of your captors in North Vietnam were appropriate?
John McCain, you were neck deep in what was up till now the biggest banking scandal and bailout in US history. Does this experience give you any special insight into the current credit crisis?
John McCain, in a recent interview you apparently did not know that Spain is a European country and a close ally. You spoke as if they were some kind of potential enemy in Latin America, even though you were reminded three times that you were discussing Spain. Later, your spokesman said that your dissing of Spain was intentional. Is either interpretation of the interview correct?
What kind of man calls his wife a "cunt" in public?
35 years ago was 1973. Richard Nixon was in office. We were decades away from the personal computer, the Internet, MUDs, and MMORPGs.
Decades, really?
Who in God's name could predict how instancing in WoW trades off versus public quests in Warhammer?
Even today, nobody cares about this.
For that matter, who PRIOR TO THE RELEASE OF FREAKING DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS would have predicted that **ten million people** really want to spend their time pretending to slay those green thingees that English professor dude wrote some fairy tale about?
Millions of people have pretended to slay the baddies for eons. It might have been difficult to predict just how much the pretending has been systematized, although the systemization of toy soldiers might have provided a clue. Tolkien as the font of creativity for RPGs may have been more or less predictable, but considering that D&D only partook of superficial sips, it's not really important.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard that frozen mammoth steaks have on occasion been served at the Kremlin.
Agreed. "Sword of the Starts", however, is a nice throwback to slider style planetary management, though it's more in the vein of "Spaceward Ho" than "Master of Orion".
The only reason why the Cold War was so terrible was that the USA and the USSR were both waiting for the other to attack. Since neither one liked each other much (for both idealogical and practical reasons) the chance that an armed conflict would happen between the two powers was pretty darn high. Except that an armed conflict might precipitate into a nuclear war should either side feel backed into a corner.
You are misinformed about how close and how often the US and USSR came to nuclear exchange, and at the very real strategic possibility that first strike was the safest option, and at the political strength of it's proponents. This is beside the near-missed accidental launches that happened on both sides several times.
You probably are also not aware of how far the nuclear situation has deteriorated since the end of the cold war.
Your Panglossian view of Nukes and MAD, which is probably representative of a broad swath of people who would rather not think about this world of terror, will lead us right towards nuclear war.
Thus the reason why the US didn't win Vietnam. The chance of starting a nuclear war was too great to risk pressing the war to a conclusion. Which raised the (very legitimate) question of why we were even in the conflict to begin with.
Where the hell did you get this idea? What could we possibly have done to Vietnam that would have caused a nuclear attack from the communists? If we'd turned Vietnam into glass ourselves, a long shot but maybe. Even so, that outcome even without retaliation would have been much worse than the one we got.
"Signs" is Shamalayan poking fun, pretty crudely I'd say, at the tendency in movies and all fiction for each plot event to have a reason. In a telling scene towards the end, the main characters are listening to a radio report about another family that was completely wiped out by the aliens. BTW, I thought Vonnegut did it better in "Breakfast of Champions."
"Unbreakable" was a nice twist on the super hero plot. Not only is the "The Villain creates Hero" cliche taken to a suitably horrifying extreme, but the hero does not defeat, could not possibly have defeated the villain in time to save any of his victims.
You just missed it.
Until we start looking at warfare on an interplanetary or interstellar scale, our existing nukes and possible antimatter warheads are going to sit in their silos and go unused.
Nukes have already been used, and do to dangerous attitudes like yours, which seem to proliferate as more time passes since the last use, they are likely to be used again.
Dinosaur pee, even!
They did take him down after only a couple of hours.
Understanding that you are mentally ill is the first step on the path to making yourself well.
We're about to cleanly clear a natural selection hurdle in a way that preserves diversity (i.e. evolutionary strength of the species), and you assholes would have us pull up, go back around, lower our heads and run straight at the hurdle. Brilliant.
If you want to be fair, you should point out that chaos theory also predicts something bad will happen if we don't clone him.
"they also said the constitution isn't a suicide pact."
I don't think anyone as long ago as the founders said this, and it's a detestable sentiment since it cheapens the sacrifice of those who gave their lives in service to the Constitution.
Latent is the wrong word for Sim Life genes since all organism were haploid. What really happened was that the genetic space was so small, turn frequency being determined by a variable with four or five possible values, that it was pretty likely you'd get whatever turn frequency you'd want in a few generations.
Turns out we're matter.
You think it's a joke, but check out this McCain ad:
Voiceover: Elitist liberals complain that John McCain doesn't know how many houses he owns.
[A Monopoly board. Houses, hotels, and Monopoly money and Chance cards ("?") spill onto it in slow motion.]
Voiceover: Who can keep track? They don't teach fancy slide-rule calculus in POW camps. John McCain may not know how many mansions he has, but he knows how many books he has.
[An empty bookshelf, covered with cobwebs. McCain walks by, holding a familiar black book.]
McCain: I can count up to The Bible.
The people who reproduce will be those too poor to afford fuck bots.
"But I think there is a large percentage of people who had children who had children who didn't want to, or who should have waited until later."
I think they world needs those people. Humans will be a lot more boring when we've evolved away non-nesting types.
A captcha is a variant on the Turing test where the judge is another computer. Spammers have defeated captchas far more difficult than scrambled inner letters, but it's a problem far beyond the sophistication of most chatbots.
I'd put it down to a difference in economic incentive.
It's not that the mutants survive, it's that everyone survives, so there's no basis for any one mutant having a better chance of survival. Which means we'll just have a lot of mutants.
This is a good thing. Mutants mean diversity, and diversity means a higher likely hood of some type of humans surviving hard times.
Idiocracy is an example of how humanity could (or already has) evolved in a direction we probably don't want
The premise of Idiocracy is not any kind of diversity trend, but a selection trend: widespread effective birth control which only stupid lazy people wouldn't use.
The MAD scenario is a major selection event.
At the top of your post you lament the lack of selection among humans, suggesting this leads to aimlessness of human evolution (a nonsense notion anyway), then derive from this three possible futures, two of which are nightmare scenarios, the same two that posit heavy selection among humans.
I blame the Darwin awards for glorifying selection as a process to remove genetic chaff. Selection doesn't do any good for the species as a whole. People selected against by one selection process, like smart people through birth control, might be useful to have around for some other future challenge.
Medicine, which increases diversity, should be applauded. Eugenics, which would decrease diversity through selection, should be fought.
Which just goes to show that real AI advancement isn't in the chat bot.
We know you would, but he's constitutionally limited to two terms.
That dude is definitely doing it wrong.
You could definitely frame it that way, but it gets less convincing each time she reminds him that the subject is Spain, not Latin America. By the end of it, it's clear that McCain could not or would not pay attention to what she was saying.
John McCain, you've voted for a law to legalize torture for suspected enemy combatants. Do you regret that decision? Does your decision imply that the actions of your captors in North Vietnam were appropriate?
John McCain, you were neck deep in what was up till now the biggest banking scandal and bailout in US history. Does this experience give you any special insight into the current credit crisis?
John McCain, in a recent interview you apparently did not know that Spain is a European country and a close ally. You spoke as if they were some kind of potential enemy in Latin America, even though you were reminded three times that you were discussing Spain. Later, your spokesman said that your dissing of Spain was intentional. Is either interpretation of the interview correct?
What kind of man calls his wife a "cunt" in public?
Conformists move to whichever wing is trendier. As the right wing loses it's status do to fucking everything up, the conformists will move left again.
35 years ago was 1973. Richard Nixon was in office. We were decades away from the personal computer, the Internet, MUDs, and MMORPGs.
Decades, really?
Who in God's name could predict how instancing in WoW trades off versus public quests in Warhammer?
Even today, nobody cares about this.
For that matter, who PRIOR TO THE RELEASE OF FREAKING DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS would have predicted that **ten million people** really want to spend their time pretending to slay those green thingees that English professor dude wrote some fairy tale about?
Millions of people have pretended to slay the baddies for eons. It might have been difficult to predict just how much the pretending has been systematized, although the systemization of toy soldiers might have provided a clue. Tolkien as the font of creativity for RPGs may have been more or less predictable, but considering that D&D only partook of superficial sips, it's not really important.