The Bush administration Justice Dept reviewed this, and while ultimately Bush decided to manually sign whatever bill they were discussing, the JP had produced a 20+ page justification that it WAS perfectly fine - the point was that the president had DECIDED to authorize the bill, not mechanically how he signed it. For example, the Constitution states that if he isn't going to sign it, he must return it - and nobody expects him to act like a process server, trying to 'catch' a congressman to literally return the bill unsigned.
They're PRISONERS. You guys do understand what that means, right?
OK, granted, I may have an issue with what China defines as prison-worthy (ie. speaking out about the government) but setting that aside, what's the problem with PRISONERS being made to perform useful tasks?
Prison costs money, and if you can make the prisoners work to recoup that cost, all the better.
In China, I'd imagine it's a damn sight better than the alternative - compulsory organ donor, or somesuch.
It's one of the more hideous webpages I've seen since Angelfire died. The illusions are all linked, and then the videos ARE LOWER ON THE SAME PAGE.
So when you load the page, and wait....and wait....and wait....it's loading a bunch of quicktime (ugh) videos below in large preview screens. be patient, it will eventually come up.
They moved the mockup planes under cover when Soviet satellites were passing over. When they supposed that the Soviets were learning about the shapes of the aircraft with infrared from shape the ground shadow left in the hot sun, they made funny-shaped shadows.
That's pretty much the whole article. Is it just me or is Nat'l Geo running out of things to write about?
Isn't it also telling that American journalists can't see the contradiction in this statement: "Did you know that the president of China is a scientist? President Hu Jintao was trained as a hydraulic engineer"?
You're more likely to get a complete rewrite of the US Constitution than you are the tax code. Not so many people are directly financially affected by a rewrite of the Constitution.
Nearly 100 years of pandering, back-scratching, paybacks, etc - I agree that a national discussion of what is a fair, simple tax rate would be great, scrapping the mess in favor of a simple, graduated tax scale with no deductions.
But let's remember that the deficits are not the result of people taking too many unexpected tax breaks. It's NOT a matter that the code is 'too complicated' to predict revenue or silliness like that.
The basic fairness of the tax code, and our national debt, are two separate issues. Our national debts are the result of DELIBERATE overspending by the people given the responsibility of spending the tax money collected.
Think about it: when you walk into a restaurant and buy a meal, do you deliberately buy more than you can afford? Repeatedly? For decades? And then go to your boss and say "I demand a raise because I spent too much"?
Do you think we should rewrite something so essential and basic, when such a bunch of retards are in congress? Especially when whatever set of new rules they create is enforceable at the barrel of a gun?
While it might make that tinfoil hat fit more comfortably to suggest there's a 'vast right-wing conspiracy', it's far more likely people (shock!) simply disagree with you.
I'm neither employed nor in any way connected with the nuclear industry, nor do I even know anyone who is. Of course, I could be lying. Further, not being an 'astroturfer' doesn't ipso facto prove there's none going on, but I'd be happy to answer your points:
1) danger - Humans are notoriously bad at estimating real risk, recognizing and highlighting "big" sporadic events but disregarding ongoing small ones. The danger of nuclear power is much like flying on an airplane vs driving a car: a perceived spike of risk if something goes wrong, vs a long term incremental risk that we've long since gotten used to. According to a number of seemingly-objective sources, coal power kills about 4000x the people per unit of power produced. That's a HUGE number. http://www.the9billion.com/2011/03/24/death-rate-from-nuclear-power-vs-coal/
2) I'm always glad when people recognize things are more complicated than they seem. More understanding - even if it's just realizing what we DON'T know - is always better. But your position is naive. Nuclear power is very much about large corporations trying to elbow their way around regulations for commercial benefit, but so is ANY industry. Further, the 'green' energy techs are even MORE about lobbyists and bureaucracy, as most of them can't live without subsidies and the smiling face of government keeping them in business. Finally, while it's easy for us to slip into the 'corporations are evil' (default comment mode on/., unfortunately), let's not forget that corporations are made up of people, some of which are no doubt motivated by unrestrained greed, but the people that work in nuke plants generally live around them and have a pretty strong vested interest in making sure they run safely.
3) blaming the anti-nuclear luddites - full disclosure, I agree that much of it is their fault, at least in the US. I remember as an elementary-school student in the late 70s watching the screaming, crying protesters being dragged out of the way of trains and trucks involved in nuclear plant construction. These people killed nuclear power in the US - no new plants have been started in the US since 1974, and the "newest" one broke ground in 1973, expected to finally finish construction in 2012. This means that the cutting-edge work on developing better, safer reactors has come from other places, like Germany and the PBR. It's ironic (and of course politically motivated) that the same/. crowd that cried bloody murder about the stunting of stem cell research during the Bush years seems to have missed noticing that the eco-abandonment of nuclear power in the US had the same effect on the R&D of safer commercial nuclear power by the US for the last 40 years. The fact is that most of the nuclear plants in the world are reaching the point where the end of their productive lifetimes is within sight - and having a 30-year hiatus on development, thanks to the anti-nuke activists - and we're decades behind where we should be in terms of developing better, safer replacements.
Let me be clear - I don't even disagree with some of the anti-nuke protesters, in terms that government oversight in the 1970s was woefully inadequate. I heard a story - probably apocryphal - that during the construction of a nuke plant in AZ or NM it was discovered that the containment vessel had been installed completely upside-down and reversed. Staggering, if true. But even in my junior-high-school mind at the time it seemed stupid to simply turn our backs in fear of nuclear power as a result.
This is why the dumbing-down of our educational system is so tragic.
The fact is that we have access to more information than any people in history, but if one is unable to think CRITICALLY about the data, it's almost worse than useless.
Why, do you suppose, Fox News is telling us about Obama's latest gaffe? Why, do you suppose, a failed presidential candidate makes a movie telling us how the world is going to hell?
Certainly, the basic information could be true or false; more likely it's a careful presentation of the factual or a blend of fact and supposition in order to encourage a specific response in the reader.
Without a good education we're unable to participate as useful citizens, and are merely a remotely-controlled 'demographic' that marches according to what the media tells us to. Sadly, this programming has always been with us and always will. The educational system used to program us to be good, unquestioningly patriotic citizens, but at least squeezed in some knowledge in the meanwhile. Now it programs our kids into reflexive iconoclasts, that they are 'good' regardless of what they do, and that their self-esteem is far more important than any silly facts, particularly if those facts came from dead white men.
"Success", on a human scale, is defined by reproduction. Passing your genes onto progeny, and increasing their chances of survival./. itself is proof that geekiness does not translate into an increase the chance you will reproduce. In fact, it's usually the opposite.
1) A number of governments across the world are uncomfortable with the idea of random sailors being armed in their ports (some out of paranoia, certainly, but I think it's a justifiable fear of escalated violence/danger in a rough business with lots of transient people), thus there is a worldwide DISincentive to giving crews access to small arms.
2) Stephen Decatur showed us how to deal with pirates almost precisely 200 years ago - they operate out of bases, ports, and with the acquiescence if not outright cooperation of local leadership. That's where you attack them. Except you're wrong - LOTS of people care if we invade anywhere, for any reason. Even a simple strike on a Somali base port is likely to kill some 'innocent' people (I put this in quotes, because I would expect that in any place where pirates flourish, pretty much everyone benefits directly or indirectly), leading to protests and great hand-wringing across the Western world.
It would be very simple to deal with pirates, if we had adequate will. Surveillance could easily identify the origin ports for the motherships. Raze them. Every mothership or pirate vessel caught dealt with quietly, summarily, and totally. Once this happened a few times - whole shiploads of men disappearing regularly - the appetite for piracy would disappear.
To 'trust' your information to someone else is simply foolishness.
Sure, you might have legal recourse because, well, there's a lawyer under every rock and you can sue anyone for anything. Ultimately, trusting anyone without making your own arrangements/backup for data that's important to you is just silly.
It's too bad that we haven't had a Department of Energy to guide our collective energy policies for something like 30-40 years.
Oh wait, we have. And they've spent BILLIONS of dollars, to do what again?
The simple fact is that infrastructure spending is motivated by growth or by decrepitude. The US isn't particularly growing into the empty spaces anymore, so that's no longer an impetus.
So now it's decrepitude. We, as a democracy, will continue to elect legislators with the nicest smile, the right skin color, or based on their policy of what is or isn't happening in a woman's uterus. Politicians who cogently explain that we will have to forego services we've become accustomed to, and even perhaps raise taxes in order to pay off the maintenance we've deferred for 30 years - will never be elected.
A bridge will collapse, we'll point fingers, it'll become politically expedient to throw piles of money at the problem (the least efficient way to maintain infrastructure), and some things will temporarily improve until everyone is distracted by Hollywood news again.
We get what we deserve, really. When's the last time you sat in on a city council meeting?
As far as I understand the article, it's that 1) ring planets are likely to be further from their main sun, due to solar pressure driving away small particulates 2) we're seeing planets further from their sun, so it's more likely we'll see ringed planets.
Just seems that this isn't much of a piece of news - it's not really discussing a new technology or technique, it's just saying that our ability to see more means we'll be more statistically likely to see something rare.
One of the caps on human expansion is the limit of raw materials and energy.
Energy: just under 100 million miles from our planet is a massive fusion reactor, putting out 3x10^20 megawatts of power PER SECOND. Never needs refuelling, can't melt down.
Raw materials: at 1997 prices (it's the metric wiki used), a sub-1-mile-diameter metallic asteroid is believed to contain more than $20 trillion in gold, cobalt, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium and ruthenium. The iron content of this same asteroid would be roughly 10x the entire world production of iron in 2004.
There is PLENTY of demand. In fact, it's all about demand. The problem is the high initial hurdle of cost/technology.
Where do you live that delivery by mail is guaranteed? Not in the US, I'm certain.
Go to your local USPS and say "Jimmy sent me a letter 3 weeks ago and I don't have it" - they will conscientiously do their best to find your letter, but if they don't find it, you have NO recourse. None.
In Victorian London, where postage was the only way to communicate, there were 3 mail deliveries per day. You could toss a letter in the box in the morning, and good odds your recipient would have it in-hand by the evening.
Now, in the age of email and massive abilities to communicate with each other, mail is only useful where the actual physical delivery of something is needed - we have better ways to communicate information.
I'd say that we could easily now drop to 3 or even 2 mail deliveries per week and be completely ok. (Personally, I could go to 1/week or even lower, but I'd imagine most people need it more than me.)
Doom3 shipped with editing built into the engine, so the fact that editing is built in is not much of a surprise.
The next big leap in modding will come when the UI for the editor is so substantial that it lets anyone (basically) build what they want.
Here's my point: running an editor used to be merely an exercise in visualization, and some game-engine arcana. Throw a brush here, brush there, texture that, toss in a light entity, check for leaks, and VOILA it was hello, world.
Now, due to the extraordinarily more powerful engines, and the ability of client systems to run more, simplicity is simply no longer tolerable. It used to be, for example, if you wanted to put a desk into a room, you put in a basic desk-shaped brush, and textured appropriately. Now you have to have a coffee cup, a desklight (with its own light entity), a chair, all breakable and movable. Even walls and windows all need to be breakable and have their own physics, etc.
Sure, it's trivia for professional modelers to build these things to suit, but this is also why AAA titles take hundreds and thousands of man-hours to create.
I believe that if they really want to see the modding community become as prolific as they were in the Quake2 days, they need to build into their engines a massive set of prefabs, and the ability to 'assemble' pieces from known articles, rather than having to design every last item (and property thereof) and texture from scratch. Leave the modders to be creative, and they will be.
The difference is that the gas tax (purported to be for infrastructure and roads) has already been co-opted into general fund usage, and this is a NEW tax that will really only be used for infrastructure and roads (they promise! this time for sure!)....
1000:1 they would implement this and leave the old gas-tax in place.
Look, I understand the socialist leanings of/.ers, I do. It's GOOD that the government will help train you if you lose your job, make sure there's handicap ramps everywhere, make sure that the umpteenth child to the high-school dropout mom gets nutritious food (why should the kid be punished that mom's a ho?). I get it. But don't you people understand that: a) everything needs to be paid for, and b) that money comes FROM US.
Need is infinite, resources are not. Government will continue to squeeze and squeeze the productive members of its society until there are no more productive members left, or the government is overturned.
Interestingly, this seems to be an evolution of the 19th-20th C mercantilist system.
First, the developed world exploited the undeveloped world for their raw materials, colonizing and dominating them in order to ship the raws back to the mother country. Now, it seems, that the West is more interested in exploiting the human resources (and not bothering to ship them in as a physical product, ala slavery) of these regions as cheap labor.
Eventually it's equally unsustainable, but between now and the realization of this it will probably take an economically- and socially-wrenching on the order of the US Civil War for us to move on from our current addiction.
...as far as the government improperly keeping things secret that should be released, vs wikileaks posting it: 1) at least I have some infinitesimal control over the government through my vote. 2) I have no control over wikileaks; moreover, the fact that document X was leaked, suggests that someone is deliberately manipulating the information in order to advance a viewpoint.
If wikileaks was truly able to release random documents, I might support it in the sense that it is useful for a citizenry to keep an eye on its government, and government obviously won't volunteer its dirtiest secrets.
But the info released through WL is just propoganda-by-proxy, and in that sense no better than the government hiding it themselves.
I'm guessing there are lots and lots of cells of Al Qaeda whose presence can be identified by the giant brown stains spreading across the floor.
Certainly, OBL wasn't stupid - he'll have kept himself as cut-out as possible, against just this eventuality. Nevertheless, most intelligence is valuable when triangulated with other data, and oh man did we just gain a doozy of a viewpoint.
The immediate targets this will provide may only be good for about 6 months before the value evaporates. The subsequent ripples of suspicion and fratricide however could be good for 2+ years in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
The Bush administration Justice Dept reviewed this, and while ultimately Bush decided to manually sign whatever bill they were discussing, the JP had produced a 20+ page justification that it WAS perfectly fine - the point was that the president had DECIDED to authorize the bill, not mechanically how he signed it. For example, the Constitution states that if he isn't going to sign it, he must return it - and nobody expects him to act like a process server, trying to 'catch' a congressman to literally return the bill unsigned.
It is a being with no functional understanding of the real world...only internalized ideals of what it thinks the world should be.
It has no history, no knowledge of what went before. It lives in the now, with choices driven entirely by impulse.
It is a being of pure ego, with the only thing it cares about being its own needs.
I don't know what it is, but I'm pretty certain it would vote Democrat.
...but I don't see the problem?
They're PRISONERS. You guys do understand what that means, right?
OK, granted, I may have an issue with what China defines as prison-worthy (ie. speaking out about the government) but setting that aside, what's the problem with PRISONERS being made to perform useful tasks?
Prison costs money, and if you can make the prisoners work to recoup that cost, all the better.
In China, I'd imagine it's a damn sight better than the alternative - compulsory organ donor, or somesuch.
It's one of the more hideous webpages I've seen since Angelfire died.
The illusions are all linked, and then the videos ARE LOWER ON THE SAME PAGE.
So when you load the page, and wait....and wait....and wait....it's loading a bunch of quicktime (ugh) videos below in large preview screens. be patient, it will eventually come up.
Wow, failsite.
They moved the mockup planes under cover when Soviet satellites were passing over.
When they supposed that the Soviets were learning about the shapes of the aircraft with infrared from shape the ground shadow left in the hot sun, they made funny-shaped shadows.
That's pretty much the whole article.
Is it just me or is Nat'l Geo running out of things to write about?
Actually, Home Front was GOING to use the PLA as the enemy, but it was changed to be the North Koreans.
Try again?
Isn't it also telling that American journalists can't see the contradiction in this statement: "Did you know that the president of China is a scientist? President Hu Jintao was trained as a hydraulic engineer"?
Scientist != engineer.
You're more likely to get a complete rewrite of the US Constitution than you are the tax code. Not so many people are directly financially affected by a rewrite of the Constitution.
Nearly 100 years of pandering, back-scratching, paybacks, etc - I agree that a national discussion of what is a fair, simple tax rate would be great, scrapping the mess in favor of a simple, graduated tax scale with no deductions.
But let's remember that the deficits are not the result of people taking too many unexpected tax breaks. It's NOT a matter that the code is 'too complicated' to predict revenue or silliness like that.
The basic fairness of the tax code, and our national debt, are two separate issues.
Our national debts are the result of DELIBERATE overspending by the people given the responsibility of spending the tax money collected.
Think about it: when you walk into a restaurant and buy a meal, do you deliberately buy more than you can afford? Repeatedly? For decades? And then go to your boss and say "I demand a raise because I spent too much"?
Do you think we should rewrite something so essential and basic, when such a bunch of retards are in congress? Especially when whatever set of new rules they create is enforceable at the barrel of a gun?
While it might make that tinfoil hat fit more comfortably to suggest there's a 'vast right-wing conspiracy', it's far more likely people (shock!) simply disagree with you.
I'm neither employed nor in any way connected with the nuclear industry, nor do I even know anyone who is. Of course, I could be lying. Further, not being an 'astroturfer' doesn't ipso facto prove there's none going on, but I'd be happy to answer your points:
1) danger - Humans are notoriously bad at estimating real risk, recognizing and highlighting "big" sporadic events but disregarding ongoing small ones. The danger of nuclear power is much like flying on an airplane vs driving a car: a perceived spike of risk if something goes wrong, vs a long term incremental risk that we've long since gotten used to. According to a number of seemingly-objective sources, coal power kills about 4000x the people per unit of power produced. That's a HUGE number. http://www.the9billion.com/2011/03/24/death-rate-from-nuclear-power-vs-coal/
2) I'm always glad when people recognize things are more complicated than they seem. More understanding - even if it's just realizing what we DON'T know - is always better. But your position is naive. Nuclear power is very much about large corporations trying to elbow their way around regulations for commercial benefit, but so is ANY industry. Further, the 'green' energy techs are even MORE about lobbyists and bureaucracy, as most of them can't live without subsidies and the smiling face of government keeping them in business. Finally, while it's easy for us to slip into the 'corporations are evil' (default comment mode on /., unfortunately), let's not forget that corporations are made up of people, some of which are no doubt motivated by unrestrained greed, but the people that work in nuke plants generally live around them and have a pretty strong vested interest in making sure they run safely.
3) blaming the anti-nuclear luddites - full disclosure, I agree that much of it is their fault, at least in the US. I remember as an elementary-school student in the late 70s watching the screaming, crying protesters being dragged out of the way of trains and trucks involved in nuclear plant construction. These people killed nuclear power in the US - no new plants have been started in the US since 1974, and the "newest" one broke ground in 1973, expected to finally finish construction in 2012. This means that the cutting-edge work on developing better, safer reactors has come from other places, like Germany and the PBR. /. crowd that cried bloody murder about the stunting of stem cell research during the Bush years seems to have missed noticing that the eco-abandonment of nuclear power in the US had the same effect on the R&D of safer commercial nuclear power by the US for the last 40 years.
It's ironic (and of course politically motivated) that the same
The fact is that most of the nuclear plants in the world are reaching the point where the end of their productive lifetimes is within sight - and having a 30-year hiatus on development, thanks to the anti-nuke activists - and we're decades behind where we should be in terms of developing better, safer replacements.
Let me be clear - I don't even disagree with some of the anti-nuke protesters, in terms that government oversight in the 1970s was woefully inadequate. I heard a story - probably apocryphal - that during the construction of a nuke plant in AZ or NM it was discovered that the containment vessel had been installed completely upside-down and reversed. Staggering, if true. But even in my junior-high-school mind at the time it seemed stupid to simply turn our backs in fear of nuclear power as a result.
This is why the dumbing-down of our educational system is so tragic.
The fact is that we have access to more information than any people in history, but if one is unable to think CRITICALLY about the data, it's almost worse than useless.
Why, do you suppose, Fox News is telling us about Obama's latest gaffe?
Why, do you suppose, a failed presidential candidate makes a movie telling us how the world is going to hell?
Certainly, the basic information could be true or false; more likely it's a careful presentation of the factual or a blend of fact and supposition in order to encourage a specific response in the reader.
Without a good education we're unable to participate as useful citizens, and are merely a remotely-controlled 'demographic' that marches according to what the media tells us to. Sadly, this programming has always been with us and always will. The educational system used to program us to be good, unquestioningly patriotic citizens, but at least squeezed in some knowledge in the meanwhile. Now it programs our kids into reflexive iconoclasts, that they are 'good' regardless of what they do, and that their self-esteem is far more important than any silly facts, particularly if those facts came from dead white men.
"Success", on a human scale, is defined by reproduction. Passing your genes onto progeny, and increasing their chances of survival. /. itself is proof that geekiness does not translate into an increase the chance you will reproduce. In fact, it's usually the opposite.
Ergo, no.
1) A number of governments across the world are uncomfortable with the idea of random sailors being armed in their ports (some out of paranoia, certainly, but I think it's a justifiable fear of escalated violence/danger in a rough business with lots of transient people), thus there is a worldwide DISincentive to giving crews access to small arms.
2) Stephen Decatur showed us how to deal with pirates almost precisely 200 years ago - they operate out of bases, ports, and with the acquiescence if not outright cooperation of local leadership. That's where you attack them. Except you're wrong - LOTS of people care if we invade anywhere, for any reason. Even a simple strike on a Somali base port is likely to kill some 'innocent' people (I put this in quotes, because I would expect that in any place where pirates flourish, pretty much everyone benefits directly or indirectly), leading to protests and great hand-wringing across the Western world.
It would be very simple to deal with pirates, if we had adequate will.
Surveillance could easily identify the origin ports for the motherships. Raze them.
Every mothership or pirate vessel caught dealt with quietly, summarily, and totally. Once this happened a few times - whole shiploads of men disappearing regularly - the appetite for piracy would disappear.
But that simply won't happen.
Geez people, this isn't new.
Congratulations, you just "figured out" the psychology behind carnival ride tickets.
It's not like it's something every scary, toothless carny has understood for 60+ years.
To 'trust' your information to someone else is simply foolishness.
Sure, you might have legal recourse because, well, there's a lawyer under every rock and you can sue anyone for anything. Ultimately, trusting anyone without making your own arrangements/backup for data that's important to you is just silly.
It's too bad that we haven't had a Department of Energy to guide our collective energy policies for something like 30-40 years.
Oh wait, we have. And they've spent BILLIONS of dollars, to do what again?
The simple fact is that infrastructure spending is motivated by growth or by decrepitude. The US isn't particularly growing into the empty spaces anymore, so that's no longer an impetus.
So now it's decrepitude. We, as a democracy, will continue to elect legislators with the nicest smile, the right skin color, or based on their policy of what is or isn't happening in a woman's uterus. Politicians who cogently explain that we will have to forego services we've become accustomed to, and even perhaps raise taxes in order to pay off the maintenance we've deferred for 30 years - will never be elected.
A bridge will collapse, we'll point fingers, it'll become politically expedient to throw piles of money at the problem (the least efficient way to maintain infrastructure), and some things will temporarily improve until everyone is distracted by Hollywood news again.
We get what we deserve, really. When's the last time you sat in on a city council meeting?
As far as I understand the article, it's that
1) ring planets are likely to be further from their main sun, due to solar pressure driving away small particulates
2) we're seeing planets further from their sun, so it's more likely we'll see ringed planets.
Just seems that this isn't much of a piece of news - it's not really discussing a new technology or technique, it's just saying that our ability to see more means we'll be more statistically likely to see something rare.
Raw materials and energy.
One of the caps on human expansion is the limit of raw materials and energy.
Energy: just under 100 million miles from our planet is a massive fusion reactor, putting out 3x10^20 megawatts of power PER SECOND. Never needs refuelling, can't melt down.
Raw materials: at 1997 prices (it's the metric wiki used), a sub-1-mile-diameter metallic asteroid is believed to contain more than $20 trillion in gold, cobalt, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium and ruthenium. The iron content of this same asteroid would be roughly 10x the entire world production of iron in 2004.
There is PLENTY of demand. In fact, it's all about demand. The problem is the high initial hurdle of cost/technology.
Where do you live that delivery by mail is guaranteed? Not in the US, I'm certain.
Go to your local USPS and say "Jimmy sent me a letter 3 weeks ago and I don't have it" - they will conscientiously do their best to find your letter, but if they don't find it, you have NO recourse. None.
Don't forget the hue and cry about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention - the folks that offer $300 to drug offenders that will have themselves sterilized.
Sounds like a win/win to me.
In Victorian London, where postage was the only way to communicate, there were 3 mail deliveries per day. You could toss a letter in the box in the morning, and good odds your recipient would have it in-hand by the evening.
Now, in the age of email and massive abilities to communicate with each other, mail is only useful where the actual physical delivery of something is needed - we have better ways to communicate information.
I'd say that we could easily now drop to 3 or even 2 mail deliveries per week and be completely ok. (Personally, I could go to 1/week or even lower, but I'd imagine most people need it more than me.)
Doom3 shipped with editing built into the engine, so the fact that editing is built in is not much of a surprise.
The next big leap in modding will come when the UI for the editor is so substantial that it lets anyone (basically) build what they want.
Here's my point: running an editor used to be merely an exercise in visualization, and some game-engine arcana. Throw a brush here, brush there, texture that, toss in a light entity, check for leaks, and VOILA it was hello, world.
Now, due to the extraordinarily more powerful engines, and the ability of client systems to run more, simplicity is simply no longer tolerable. It used to be, for example, if you wanted to put a desk into a room, you put in a basic desk-shaped brush, and textured appropriately. Now you have to have a coffee cup, a desklight (with its own light entity), a chair, all breakable and movable. Even walls and windows all need to be breakable and have their own physics, etc.
Sure, it's trivia for professional modelers to build these things to suit, but this is also why AAA titles take hundreds and thousands of man-hours to create.
I believe that if they really want to see the modding community become as prolific as they were in the Quake2 days, they need to build into their engines a massive set of prefabs, and the ability to 'assemble' pieces from known articles, rather than having to design every last item (and property thereof) and texture from scratch. Leave the modders to be creative, and they will be.
The difference is that the gas tax (purported to be for infrastructure and roads) has already been co-opted into general fund usage, and this is a NEW tax that will really only be used for infrastructure and roads (they promise! this time for sure!)....
1000:1 they would implement this and leave the old gas-tax in place.
Look, I understand the socialist leanings of /.ers, I do. It's GOOD that the government will help train you if you lose your job, make sure there's handicap ramps everywhere, make sure that the umpteenth child to the high-school dropout mom gets nutritious food (why should the kid be punished that mom's a ho?). I get it. But don't you people understand that:
a) everything needs to be paid for, and
b) that money comes FROM US.
Need is infinite, resources are not. Government will continue to squeeze and squeeze the productive members of its society until there are no more productive members left, or the government is overturned.
Interestingly, this seems to be an evolution of the 19th-20th C mercantilist system.
First, the developed world exploited the undeveloped world for their raw materials, colonizing and dominating them in order to ship the raws back to the mother country. Now, it seems, that the West is more interested in exploiting the human resources (and not bothering to ship them in as a physical product, ala slavery) of these regions as cheap labor.
Eventually it's equally unsustainable, but between now and the realization of this it will probably take an economically- and socially-wrenching on the order of the US Civil War for us to move on from our current addiction.
...as far as the government improperly keeping things secret that should be released, vs wikileaks posting it:
1) at least I have some infinitesimal control over the government through my vote.
2) I have no control over wikileaks; moreover, the fact that document X was leaked, suggests that someone is deliberately manipulating the information in order to advance a viewpoint.
If wikileaks was truly able to release random documents, I might support it in the sense that it is useful for a citizenry to keep an eye on its government, and government obviously won't volunteer its dirtiest secrets.
But the info released through WL is just propoganda-by-proxy, and in that sense no better than the government hiding it themselves.
I'm guessing there are lots and lots of cells of Al Qaeda whose presence can be identified by the giant brown stains spreading across the floor.
Certainly, OBL wasn't stupid - he'll have kept himself as cut-out as possible, against just this eventuality. Nevertheless, most intelligence is valuable when triangulated with other data, and oh man did we just gain a doozy of a viewpoint.
The immediate targets this will provide may only be good for about 6 months before the value evaporates. The subsequent ripples of suspicion and fratricide however could be good for 2+ years in the future.