Wifey: Can I see your new game?
Me: Sure. It takes a long time to load, but here...
Wifey: Oh! She's so cute!
Me: It's a he! And my creature is not cute, he's 'neutral'.
Wifey: What's he doing.
Me: No, don't poop on the villagers! Bad boy!
Wifey: Oh my god! He's about to eat that little girl.
I can't beleive that they're not going to recover the jet after it crashes. While I understand that this is a test of the engine only, it seems like there would be a wealth of data to be had from examining the structure of the device, even after it crashed.
While I'm no engineer, don't crash investigators for regular airplanes often look for things as minor as cracks in the substructure to indicate possible areas of improvement for future planes?
I think it's a horrible waste of information and effort to let this thing sink to the bottom of the ocean. Worse, they're putting information in the hands of the other few countries with the resources to salvage this guy, and you can sure bet that they won't share the results with us.
I can't account for everything a comics artist can pull off, of course, but I did try to cover the major, conventional visual idioms that have developed in Western comics over the last century.
I think this line pretty much speaks for itself, but I will raise a few more points. The internet has allowed comics to pretty firmly break the traditional limitations of print. This DTD seems to want to codify everything inside those old limitations. That's a pretty limiting point of view, I think.
Where are the tags to show art that crosses multiple panels? Where are the tags to show 'visual' thought bubbles. Where is the anime-style giant sweatdrop tag? Where are the tags to show 'emotional' sound effects, as are often displayed in manga and manga-based comics?
Unfortuneately, this DTD pretty firmly ignores everything that doesn't go along with western newspaper-style comics, despite the fact that the author wants to let people break out of those old traditions.
Bzzt! So sorry, but you lose! Please play again, McIntosh-san!
Hmm? As an average geek who plans to enjoy Ep2 when it comes out, but is not obsessing about it, or particularly horny for Natalie Portman, can we get a slashbox for Theforce.net to get some of the more pointless SW news off the main page? Huh? It can't be that hard to set up, guys, espcially if you've got one for Sluggy Freelence.
What's sad is not the fact that the game houses are innovating and creating great new concepts and ideas for interacting with one's computers.
What's sad *is* the fact that a lot of programmers refuse to think like non-programmers and design interfaces that are truly beautiful to see and use, like B&W's.
This was just the kind of situation Gnutella was designed to prevent, and I think it will.
Even if MPAA files injunctions against each and every one of the thousands of movie traders out there, they still won't be able to stop the flow of movies because most of these guys can simply get a new account somewhere else once their ISP has caved. Heaven forbid, if they run out of broadband options, then they just sign up for any of the myriad free 700 hours of AOHell.
Yeah, the MPAA is evil, Blah, blah blah. Here, they're just pathetic.
This is the (real) innovation we've been waiting for. It's just sad that it came out of a game house instead of application programmers.
Think about it: The one reason that many people think that command prompt shells are superior to 'gruntnclick' is that the ability to use written language and commands is infinitely more flexible than typical WIMP operations. Despite the fact that it's slower than Grandma before she's had her prunes, most of the developers I know eventually drop down to csh or bash to get 'any real work' done.
Gesture systems, provided in combo with typical WIMP operations, have the potential to change that. If there is a gesture for every non-destructive command, and gestures can be stacked so that you can direct the output of one gesture command into another, you've created a truly flexible and intuitive command interface.
I've been playing B&W since it came out, and in only a couple weeks, I can shoot fireballs and sheild spells around like no one's business. I suspect that this will be true for a great majority of computer users. Not all, but enough to make the project worth it.
Zoom into an image in photoshop, select a square capture to clipboard, paste into new image. If I can do that with a few gestures rather than 8 different menu commands, I will have sped up my image processing dramatically without having to write a complex script or plugin to do it for me.
Now Lionhead has talked a little bit about releasing their source code if the game becomes popular enough. What I would like to see is source for their gesture recognition systems so that it can be integrated into KDE and Gnome, and OS plugins for Win32 and MacOS. With the level of interest in this new system, that may not even be necessary.
creative individual with schizophrenic tendancies marked with delusions of grandeur and persecution and a possible self-destructive urge
I'm platform agnostic, but spent a great while in the company of Mac-users and this is true for just about every one I've ever met.
The sysadmin at the college where I was a volunteer webmaster? He would constantly go on and on about how great 'his' platform was and how superior it was over Wintel, and then in the next breath complain of all the conspiracies Microsoft was involved in to make sure that he and other Mac users were never able to play the good games or use any of the popular apps. Then he'd turn around and try to see how much warez he could upload to public servers without getting caught.
The graphic designer I worked with?
He would spend hours ranting about how our company's PC-using tech support area would abuse him because he was a Mac user, but then go on and on about the hardware superiority of the G3 over the eqivalent Pentium-II's at the time. Then he would fire off incindiary emails to the company president.
These documents indicate that hosts who want to use IPv6 need a DNS server that will support it. Unless you run your own DNS, which is not something that most home users do, this is dependent on the whim and pocketbooks of ISP's and BB providers.
You may run your own DNS, but I can count the people I know who would get any use out of their own DNS server on one hand.
AVES, and other domain services are probably going to be the way we do things for a long time to come. Despite the fact that the technology exists, the sheer cost of upgrading the *entire* internet to IPv6 is prohibitive.
If you're Cisco, you're interested in getting IPv6 capable routers out the door, but recognize the fact that very few people want or need them yet because the 'rest of the internet' doesn't use IPv6 yet. Even if you can muster the cash to make the code change (which Cisco has, if I remember correctly) you still have to provide combo routers and switches, and hope for market penetration to make the investment in IPv6 worth it.
If you're an ATT or a Worldcom, you more than have the cash to do it, but it will make your bottom line look bad if you spend millions on upgrading routers and switches. As we all know, in the U.S. nothing is more important that the bottom line (gag).
If you're a home user, you'd love to go to IPv6 so that you can run your own OpenNap, Icecast, FTP, Web, etc... server, but realize that you will never convince your ISP to allow you to do so since they're still using IP4 protocols and working with backbone providers who use IP4 protocols.
So you use AVES, making it possible for those who would otherwise be force to use it put off IPv6 off just a little longer.
The 'revolution' you've been waiting for has gone on all around us in the last 10 years and is still in the waging. It's not been fought with guns in the streets and fields, but in the hearts and minds of the entire world.
It's being fought in AOL chatrooms where poor lusers who can't get any other service fight against greed and stupidity. It's going on in the courtrooms where Microsoft is fighting to become one of the largest barons in the new global kingdom and where Napster is fighting for their right to exist at all.
You fire a shot in the 'revolution' every time you write an op-ed piece for an online magazine. It happens every time a Joe Sixpack gets a new computer and discovers that he can get news online from a variety of sources instead of waiting for the Five-o'clock Skews from the Big 4.
Every MP3 and Warez file that is downloaded irrevocably wears away at the existing powerbase of information and publishing that has been built up over four centuries of publishing and information control.
The revolution started without you, Dave. It's a shame, because we could have used you.
As consoles and other 'consumer' technology gets more and more complex, software and firmware become more and more real a problem. For example, my VCR never has any logic problems, but my APEX DVD player will occasionally fail to start a next chapter, or will garble the sound and video. It's MPEG2 drivers have apparently crashed, and the machine has to be powercycled to start running again.
Being that the Xbox is going to use a Pentium 3 processor, a piece of silicon that we *know* has at least a few minor bugs, and M$ software, I think we can be assured of having at least an occasional crash. Possibly, especially under heavy load as a webserver, this will be more often than corresponding Linux or BSD crashes, making it unsuitable for use as a webserver.
...in any way whatsoever. It's the harbringer of the new dot.reality.
I mean, it's great to read it and keep abreast of what tech industries are getting bent over that week. If you find out that it's blocked at your company's firewall, you know to start polishing your resume!
Damn. Although you're joking, you almost make this 'Matrix' sound like a good idea. How many times have I wished to 'pull the wool' over the eyes of the IT vice-president at my company? He would 'realize' that the world never changed and always stayed just the same so he was perfectly comfortable, while I could get on with dealing with new technologies and new concepts so that I could do my job without a lot of micro-management.
Sorry if this is getting off-topic but... since when is Hotline "peer-to-peer"?
While Hotline appears to work on the old 'client-server' rote, it's much more similiar to a BBS system. The only difference between Hotline and something like Napster is that the file and server are integrated in the Napster application. Both programs contain all the features we see in 'mature' P2P apps such as chat, file x-change, etc..
When it first started, Hotline was a great app. It was probably one of the first peer2peer sharing applications that one could reliably find MP3's on. It was the first peer2peer application that I ever used, at any rate.
It was great at the time, because you didn't have to do the hunt and peck thing with Hotline, or beg for rare tracks on usenet. You could find what you want, frequently by the server's name and/or theme, and then try to upload in response.
Of course, getting a stable version out for Win32 destroyed this rather friendly exchange for the same reason that all of AOL's millions of users make it difficult to use what would otherwise be a pretty good service. People began to use Hotline to try to make money and run scams. Most HL servers, I suspect, are fronts for banner schemes now. These schemes are probably seen by advertisers as part of the primary reasons why the banner market is so unsafe.
I find it ironic that the application's creator was screwed over for the same reason that it's users were: GREED.
I'm glad that he didn't pursue. I don't think it would have been worth his time. Personally, I hope he starts out and creates another great, innovative, killer app.
So I'm really looking forward to this little piece of happiness.
Be it news, commentary, discussion, or fiction, I prefer reading from my computer screen to letting my hand cramp trying to hold up a magazine or a paperback.
What I want to see is a good comparison of equivalent function applications in the new version of PERl, PHP, JSP/Java Servlets which my company uses for all kinds of reporting, and ASP.
I got stuck with a roomate who was a monster of a person. He weighed 400 pounds and smelled like it. He was a truly gross individual, and despite the fact that I have met many unpleasant people over the years, no one single individual has ever weighed into my nightmares so much.
Now before I left home, I had a NES and a Sega Genesis. I was required by my parents to leave those behind so that I could *study*.
After a few weeks of futiley trying to find another roomate in my dorm, however, I went and bought an old-style Gameboy and Super Metroid. It saved my sanity, and whenever I felt suicidal or homicidal, several rounds of Dr. Mario, Super Metroid or brain-numbing Tetris would pull me back up over the edge.
To Gunpei Yokoi and all the other talented engineers and designers who worked on the original game boy, I salute you. Your hard work saved the life of a po' white boy who didn't know no better.
Part of the hype surrounding the Xbox is the fact that Microsoft will allow game developers to develop on PC's capable of using DirectX. Compare this to Nintendo, who require developers to purchase an expensive SGI system to develop for n64.
What this means is that most games for XBox will require few or no changes to work on a proper PC.
This is the way that Indrema *should* work if it ever gets the money, a proposition which I doubt considering how hard it is for Linux companies to turn a profit now. Like the XBox, games written for GTK or whatever on the Indrema would work with very little modification on other Linux workstations.
Because people won't be developing games on Linux for Indrema, however, means that people won't be developing those games for Linux. It's a sad loss, but one that's hardly surprising.
So who do you think will be the first one to mine a neutron star, the Americans, the Russian, or the Chinesse?
Actually mining a Neutron star would be... difficult.
First of all, the reason a neutron star is called such is because all the proton and electrons have decayed into neutrons due to the intense gravity. (I'm not sure of the exact physics. Someone clarify for me.) Gold and Platinum won't exist per se on a Neutron star. You'll just have one large, endless sea of nigh-impervious neutron matter.
Second of all, even if you did want to mine Neutronium, the graviational forces that converted the rest of the star's core to neutronium would do the same thing to you once you touched down, assuming the tidal forces of the star's gravity didn't tear your mining ship to shreads on close approach.
The only real way to extract gold and platinum from Neutron stars is to do it the way we have been for thousands of years as has been described in the article, IE: wait for them to collide and explode and then pick through the remnants. Our solar system and planet just happened to have formed out of such a mess, so we have a relatively abundant supply of these minerals on Earth and are likely to have abundant supplies elsewhere in the Solar system.
If we could actually control the collision of two such stars or were able to use energy devices to 'carve' up a neutron star into smaller, more manageable and less destructive chunks, I'm pretty sure that we'd have more to think about than gold or platinum. I'm not sure of the street value of plutonium and uranium or other heavy radioactive elements, but I'm guessing that we'd be looking for those instead to power our mining devices and/or sell to the aliens who don't have nukes yet.
Re:This guy has obviously never run a website...
on
Republic.Com
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, the links tend to get outdated. It's been a while since I've tried to update them all.
This guy has obviously never run a website...
on
Republic.Com
·
· Score: 5
I maintain a series of my admittedly liberal and somewhat populist views on my website on a 'Rant Page'.
Subject matter ranges from griping about bad Anime dubs or things that piss me off in the news. I regularly slam organized religion, conservatism, and moralism.
What really amazed me when I started this site was the large number of emails it generated, both in favor and against the ideas I put forth. Some are flames, but a good number are intelligent, crafted rebuttals of my arguments. It has improved my world view, and made me more prone to carefully consider my arguments before I post them.
While I do think that hate groups and kiddie porn groups exist that feed off of their own homogenity, I think this trend is not the norm and still a sign of stupidity or introverted and psychotic behavrior. From my experiences, I beleive that the majority of intelligent people out there do seek out differing views on the subjects they're interested in.
Slashdot Mirror
Wifey: Can I see your new game? Me: Sure. It takes a long time to load, but here... Wifey: Oh! She's so cute! Me: It's a he! And my creature is not cute, he's 'neutral'. Wifey: What's he doing. Me: No, don't poop on the villagers! Bad boy! Wifey: Oh my god! He's about to eat that little girl.
Mod this guy up.
Boy, this software would be perfect if they had a Win32 build. Sadly, I'm still stuck in Windows for most of my multimedia work.
I can't beleive that they're not going to recover the jet after it crashes. While I understand that this is a test of the engine only, it seems like there would be a wealth of data to be had from examining the structure of the device, even after it crashed.
While I'm no engineer, don't crash investigators for regular airplanes often look for things as minor as cracks in the substructure to indicate possible areas of improvement for future planes?
I think it's a horrible waste of information and effort to let this thing sink to the bottom of the ocean. Worse, they're putting information in the hands of the other few countries with the resources to salvage this guy, and you can sure bet that they won't share the results with us.
C'mon guys. Fish it out!
I can't account for everything a comics artist can pull off, of course, but I did try to cover the major, conventional visual idioms that have developed in Western comics over the last century.
I think this line pretty much speaks for itself, but I will raise a few more points. The internet has allowed comics to pretty firmly break the traditional limitations of print. This DTD seems to want to codify everything inside those old limitations. That's a pretty limiting point of view, I think.
Where are the tags to show art that crosses multiple panels? Where are the tags to show 'visual' thought bubbles. Where is the anime-style giant sweatdrop tag? Where are the tags to show 'emotional' sound effects, as are often displayed in manga and manga-based comics?
Unfortuneately, this DTD pretty firmly ignores everything that doesn't go along with western newspaper-style comics, despite the fact that the author wants to let people break out of those old traditions.
Bzzt! So sorry, but you lose! Please play again, McIntosh-san!
Hmm? As an average geek who plans to enjoy Ep2 when it comes out, but is not obsessing about it, or particularly horny for Natalie Portman, can we get a slashbox for Theforce.net to get some of the more pointless SW news off the main page? Huh? It can't be that hard to set up, guys, espcially if you've got one for Sluggy Freelence.
That's right, Mod me down, karma-boy.
What's sad is not the fact that the game houses are innovating and creating great new concepts and ideas for interacting with one's computers.
What's sad *is* the fact that a lot of programmers refuse to think like non-programmers and design interfaces that are truly beautiful to see and use, like B&W's.
This was just the kind of situation Gnutella was designed to prevent, and I think it will.
Even if MPAA files injunctions against each and every one of the thousands of movie traders out there, they still won't be able to stop the flow of movies because most of these guys can simply get a new account somewhere else once their ISP has caved. Heaven forbid, if they run out of broadband options, then they just sign up for any of the myriad free 700 hours of AOHell.
Yeah, the MPAA is evil, Blah, blah blah. Here, they're just pathetic.
This is the (real) innovation we've been waiting for. It's just sad that it came out of a game house instead of application programmers.
Think about it: The one reason that many people think that command prompt shells are superior to 'gruntnclick' is that the ability to use written language and commands is infinitely more flexible than typical WIMP operations. Despite the fact that it's slower than Grandma before she's had her prunes, most of the developers I know eventually drop down to csh or bash to get 'any real work' done.
Gesture systems, provided in combo with typical WIMP operations, have the potential to change that. If there is a gesture for every non-destructive command, and gestures can be stacked so that you can direct the output of one gesture command into another, you've created a truly flexible and intuitive command interface.
I've been playing B&W since it came out, and in only a couple weeks, I can shoot fireballs and sheild spells around like no one's business. I suspect that this will be true for a great majority of computer users. Not all, but enough to make the project worth it.
Zoom into an image in photoshop, select a square capture to clipboard, paste into new image. If I can do that with a few gestures rather than 8 different menu commands, I will have sped up my image processing dramatically without having to write a complex script or plugin to do it for me.
Now Lionhead has talked a little bit about releasing their source code if the game becomes popular enough. What I would like to see is source for their gesture recognition systems so that it can be integrated into KDE and Gnome, and OS plugins for Win32 and MacOS. With the level of interest in this new system, that may not even be necessary.
This *will* work. Get behind it, guys!
creative individual with schizophrenic tendancies marked with delusions of grandeur and persecution and a possible self-destructive urge
I'm platform agnostic, but spent a great while in the company of Mac-users and this is true for just about every one I've ever met.
The sysadmin at the college where I was a volunteer webmaster? He would constantly go on and on about how great 'his' platform was and how superior it was over Wintel, and then in the next breath complain of all the conspiracies Microsoft was involved in to make sure that he and other Mac users were never able to play the good games or use any of the popular apps. Then he'd turn around and try to see how much warez he could upload to public servers without getting caught.
The graphic designer I worked with?
He would spend hours ranting about how our company's PC-using tech support area would abuse him because he was a Mac user, but then go on and on about the hardware superiority of the G3 over the eqivalent Pentium-II's at the time. Then he would fire off incindiary emails to the company president.
I *could* go on, but I think you get the point.
These documents indicate that hosts who want to use IPv6 need a DNS server that will support it. Unless you run your own DNS, which is not something that most home users do, this is dependent on the whim and pocketbooks of ISP's and BB providers.
You may run your own DNS, but I can count the people I know who would get any use out of their own DNS server on one hand.
AVES, and other domain services are probably going to be the way we do things for a long time to come. Despite the fact that the technology exists, the sheer cost of upgrading the *entire* internet to IPv6 is prohibitive.
If you're Cisco, you're interested in getting IPv6 capable routers out the door, but recognize the fact that very few people want or need them yet because the 'rest of the internet' doesn't use IPv6 yet. Even if you can muster the cash to make the code change (which Cisco has, if I remember correctly) you still have to provide combo routers and switches, and hope for market penetration to make the investment in IPv6 worth it.
If you're an ATT or a Worldcom, you more than have the cash to do it, but it will make your bottom line look bad if you spend millions on upgrading routers and switches. As we all know, in the U.S. nothing is more important that the bottom line (gag).
If you're a home user, you'd love to go to IPv6 so that you can run your own OpenNap, Icecast, FTP, Web, etc... server, but realize that you will never convince your ISP to allow you to do so since they're still using IP4 protocols and working with backbone providers who use IP4 protocols.
So you use AVES, making it possible for those who would otherwise be force to use it put off IPv6 off just a little longer.
The 'revolution' you've been waiting for has gone on all around us in the last 10 years and is still in the waging. It's not been fought with guns in the streets and fields, but in the hearts and minds of the entire world.
It's being fought in AOL chatrooms where poor lusers who can't get any other service fight against greed and stupidity. It's going on in the courtrooms where Microsoft is fighting to become one of the largest barons in the new global kingdom and where Napster is fighting for their right to exist at all.
You fire a shot in the 'revolution' every time you write an op-ed piece for an online magazine. It happens every time a Joe Sixpack gets a new computer and discovers that he can get news online from a variety of sources instead of waiting for the Five-o'clock Skews from the Big 4.
Every MP3 and Warez file that is downloaded irrevocably wears away at the existing powerbase of information and publishing that has been built up over four centuries of publishing and information control.
The revolution started without you, Dave. It's a shame, because we could have used you.
As consoles and other 'consumer' technology gets more and more complex, software and firmware become more and more real a problem. For example, my VCR never has any logic problems, but my APEX DVD player will occasionally fail to start a next chapter, or will garble the sound and video. It's MPEG2 drivers have apparently crashed, and the machine has to be powercycled to start running again.
Being that the Xbox is going to use a Pentium 3 processor, a piece of silicon that we *know* has at least a few minor bugs, and M$ software, I think we can be assured of having at least an occasional crash. Possibly, especially under heavy load as a webserver, this will be more often than corresponding Linux or BSD crashes, making it unsuitable for use as a webserver.
...in any way whatsoever. It's the harbringer of the new dot.reality.
I mean, it's great to read it and keep abreast of what tech industries are getting bent over that week. If you find out that it's blocked at your company's firewall, you know to start polishing your resume!
Damn. Although you're joking, you almost make this 'Matrix' sound like a good idea. How many times have I wished to 'pull the wool' over the eyes of the IT vice-president at my company? He would 'realize' that the world never changed and always stayed just the same so he was perfectly comfortable, while I could get on with dealing with new technologies and new concepts so that I could do my job without a lot of micro-management.
"I think we've pinpointed where the denial of service attack is coming from."
"Where?"
"Guess."
"Figures. I knew I shouldn't have made that bet with Rob over the election..."
Sorry if this is getting off-topic but ... since when is Hotline "peer-to-peer"?
While Hotline appears to work on the old 'client-server' rote, it's much more similiar to a BBS system. The only difference between Hotline and something like Napster is that the file and server are integrated in the Napster application. Both programs contain all the features we see in 'mature' P2P apps such as chat, file x-change, etc..
When it first started, Hotline was a great app. It was probably one of the first peer2peer sharing applications that one could reliably find MP3's on. It was the first peer2peer application that I ever used, at any rate.
It was great at the time, because you didn't have to do the hunt and peck thing with Hotline, or beg for rare tracks on usenet. You could find what you want, frequently by the server's name and/or theme, and then try to upload in response.
Of course, getting a stable version out for Win32 destroyed this rather friendly exchange for the same reason that all of AOL's millions of users make it difficult to use what would otherwise be a pretty good service. People began to use Hotline to try to make money and run scams. Most HL servers, I suspect, are fronts for banner schemes now. These schemes are probably seen by advertisers as part of the primary reasons why the banner market is so unsafe.
I find it ironic that the application's creator was screwed over for the same reason that it's users were: GREED.
I'm glad that he didn't pursue. I don't think it would have been worth his time. Personally, I hope he starts out and creates another great, innovative, killer app.
So I'm really looking forward to this little piece of happiness. Be it news, commentary, discussion, or fiction, I prefer reading from my computer screen to letting my hand cramp trying to hold up a magazine or a paperback.
What I want to see is a good comparison of equivalent function applications in the new version of PERl, PHP, JSP/Java Servlets which my company uses for all kinds of reporting, and ASP.
I got stuck with a roomate who was a monster of a person. He weighed 400 pounds and smelled like it. He was a truly gross individual, and despite the fact that I have met many unpleasant people over the years, no one single individual has ever weighed into my nightmares so much.
Now before I left home, I had a NES and a Sega Genesis. I was required by my parents to leave those behind so that I could *study*.
After a few weeks of futiley trying to find another roomate in my dorm, however, I went and bought an old-style Gameboy and Super Metroid. It saved my sanity, and whenever I felt suicidal or homicidal, several rounds of Dr. Mario, Super Metroid or brain-numbing Tetris would pull me back up over the edge.
To Gunpei Yokoi and all the other talented engineers and designers who worked on the original game boy, I salute you. Your hard work saved the life of a po' white boy who didn't know no better.
Part of the hype surrounding the Xbox is the fact that Microsoft will allow game developers to develop on PC's capable of using DirectX. Compare this to Nintendo, who require developers to purchase an expensive SGI system to develop for n64.
What this means is that most games for XBox will require few or no changes to work on a proper PC.
This is the way that Indrema *should* work if it ever gets the money, a proposition which I doubt considering how hard it is for Linux companies to turn a profit now. Like the XBox, games written for GTK or whatever on the Indrema would work with very little modification on other Linux workstations.
Because people won't be developing games on Linux for Indrema, however, means that people won't be developing those games for Linux. It's a sad loss, but one that's hardly surprising.
ALL YOUR SEGA ARE BELONG TO XBOX!
So who do you think will be the first one to mine a neutron star, the Americans, the Russian, or the Chinesse?
Actually mining a Neutron star would be... difficult.
First of all, the reason a neutron star is called such is because all the proton and electrons have decayed into neutrons due to the intense gravity. (I'm not sure of the exact physics. Someone clarify for me.) Gold and Platinum won't exist per se on a Neutron star. You'll just have one large, endless sea of nigh-impervious neutron matter.
Second of all, even if you did want to mine Neutronium, the graviational forces that converted the rest of the star's core to neutronium would do the same thing to you once you touched down, assuming the tidal forces of the star's gravity didn't tear your mining ship to shreads on close approach.
The only real way to extract gold and platinum from Neutron stars is to do it the way we have been for thousands of years as has been described in the article, IE: wait for them to collide and explode and then pick through the remnants. Our solar system and planet just happened to have formed out of such a mess, so we have a relatively abundant supply of these minerals on Earth and are likely to have abundant supplies elsewhere in the Solar system.
If we could actually control the collision of two such stars or were able to use energy devices to 'carve' up a neutron star into smaller, more manageable and less destructive chunks, I'm pretty sure that we'd have more to think about than gold or platinum. I'm not sure of the street value of plutonium and uranium or other heavy radioactive elements, but I'm guessing that we'd be looking for those instead to power our mining devices and/or sell to the aliens who don't have nukes yet.
Yeah, the links tend to get outdated. It's been a while since I've tried to update them all.
I maintain a series of my admittedly liberal and somewhat populist views on my website on a 'Rant Page'.
http://www.furinkan.net/rant/
Subject matter ranges from griping about bad Anime dubs or things that piss me off in the news. I regularly slam organized religion, conservatism, and moralism.
What really amazed me when I started this site was the large number of emails it generated, both in favor and against the ideas I put forth. Some are flames, but a good number are intelligent, crafted rebuttals of my arguments. It has improved my world view, and made me more prone to carefully consider my arguments before I post them.
While I do think that hate groups and kiddie porn groups exist that feed off of their own homogenity, I think this trend is not the norm and still a sign of stupidity or introverted and psychotic behavrior. From my experiences, I beleive that the majority of intelligent people out there do seek out differing views on the subjects they're interested in.