Try and remember that Reuters are writing for the record, and that the definitions are always changing. Look at Arafat: terrorist, freedom fighter, or inspired statesman? Depends on whether a peace deal can be brokered, right?
But given that, it sucks even more that they chose to run this as an inflamatory anti-piracy story. Bear in mind though that it's entirely possible that the person who wrote it simply doesn't understand the issues.
I assume the robots work in tandem with each other
I was thinking that robots plural is a misnomer, and that for all practical purposes this is a robot, singular. Sure, it's neat that the parts are separated, but if they act together and are individually useless, that passes the duck test for being a single entity.
This is a sea that hasn't been exposed to anything above the ice for a looong time. We have no idea what effects this could cause....
As a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty, the United States is obliged to ". . . pursue studies of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies . . . so as to avoid their harmful contamination. . . ". Non-contamination of Europa is already being dealt with
Right, and my car engine is powered by the chassis. Linux is the kernel, as used in embedded systems (like the 'phone switch I'm working on now), non-X systems (like my home firewall/router), PS2's, and BeOS/Linux systems for that matter.
Strangely enough, I didn't. Support and maintance. I'll be clearer: we're an R&D shop where all the users have to customised installs to one degree or another anyway. Oh, we're not supposed to, we're all supposed to be running NT 4.0 SP 6a, and a few approved apps, but the only trouble with that is that if we stuck to the approved list, we'd be utterly unable to do our jobs, and we'd fold within a month.
Our IS guys know this, and there's a tacit agreement of "Don't ask, don't tell," apart from the irregular software audits. My issue with this is that it's completely farcical. We (development) have to go out of our way to pretend that we can do our job with the corporate approved boxen, which is totally untrue. But nobody in management will actually bitchslap IS and get them to approve what we really need, because that would involve making a decision, and the best way to be wrong is to take a stand, right?
I'm not claiming that this is a common situation, just that it's best to consider the source of any opinion about name brand boxen. They're great for IS, but what's great for IS isn't necessarily what's actually needed by the users.
Face it, contracts exist to protect BOTH signatories.
What planet are you living on? A boilerplate contract (which is what we're talking about) exists solely to protect the party that paid the lawyer that drew it up.
You're missing the main point anyway. The most chilling words an engineer can hear is "Run it past legal," because that's now corporate shorthand for "I want to kill this project, but not leave my greasy fingerprints on it." We're at the stage where lawyers now dictate to development, and the only way to get a project completed is to get it to the stage where the first that legal hears about it that sales contracts have been signed.
R&D is inherently risky and prone to failure and errors (and therefore liability). That's fundamentally incompatible with legal department that will veto anything with an ounce of risk in it, which pretty much means everything involving human beings.
Add in actual legislative regulations (DMCA, Son of SSSCA, export regulations), and it's a bloody miracle that anything gets developed any more. This isn't a good time to be doing development work for any corporation.
Being a minor, NO contract he agrees to is valid - he could do anything he wanted to with whatever information he gets from Apple.
Dear Junior, because we can't force you to play nice, we assume you'll play nasty.
Oh yeah, great message. Add in the MPAA/RIAA's "You're all thieves and liars that need to be controlled" and we've arrived at a really enlightened society where everyone you don't have a strangehold on is assumed guilty.
You know, I seem to remember a couple of strange old fashioned concepts called "trust" and "good faith", but then I'm getting on and my mind may be playing tricks on me.
I can't believe they didn't win for best screenplay adaptation
Quite, but I can't understand why it won anything but screenplay and visual effects.
Cinematography? I only saw up-the-nose shots or helicopter flybys. OK, there were a few midrange shots, but the strobe editing managed to disguise that nicely. OK, cinematography also covers location selection, but given that many of the locations were heavily CGI'd, that's a pretty spurious award.
Makeup? Most of it was CGI, and the stuff that wasn't was pretty much Xena level. Of the main characters, only Gimli had serious makeup, and that was mostly wasted because he didn't have a part other than comic relief. Perhaps it was a token award because John Rhys-Davies was allergic to the makeup, and got half his face burned off, or more likely it was just an award on the quantity of makeup used.
Music? Are you kidding? OK, the score itself was appropriate, but the application of it was simply appalling. I have never got so sick of a score so fast, nor sighed with relief at the few moments where they just shut up and let Middle Earth get a few words in. And Enya? I nearly puked. Perhaps "Music (Score)" means "best revenue generating album", but that's hardly good comment on the movie.
Visual effects, fair enough. This was pretty much a CGI film with a few live action actors filling in the blanks.
Speaking of the actors, there really should be awards for "most effective" rather than just "best". I mean, given how little screen time each actor got, it's amazing that they even registered on our consciousness. Consider: Ian McKellen plays a bumbling buffoon who gets everything wrong and then falls down a hole, and yet we still cared, because he was Gandalf. Liv Tyler had a part that barely deserved a credit, and yet she played it to perfection, surprised me greatly in fact, and gave the role a depth that it really didn't deserve for the time it was allowed.
All in all, FotR really deserves an award for "Film that screwed up the least, given that it had everything going against it." I still don't think it was actually anything like enjoyable cinema (although the full director's cut might at least show all of half the sub-plots rather than half of some of the sub-plots), and clearly the academy didn't either, given that it won the "And moving quickly on..." awards.
When I have a problem with a Dell box, I get a replacement the same day (or next, depending on how much cash flow we had when we purchased it)
Funnily enough, the last time I checked with my IS guys, I could put together two complete no-brand systems for what they pay for a full Dell system + support. Given that I spend a lot of time compiling, having two boxen would be a positive benefit. I have the desk space, I have the inclination, and I think we can live with the electricity bill. Worst case, a component fails and I end up with one machine plus a box of spares, with a zero second turnaround, never mind one day.
I suggested this, and got the usual answer: we buy standard Dell boxen because it removes support and maintenance issues.
That sounds fair enough until you consider that I receive exactly zero support for the problems that I have on my machine. We're an R&D shop, and taking risks and pushing things until they go wrong is pretty much what we do for a living. What the IS guys really mean is: nobody ever got fired for buying Dell (/IBM/Microsoft).
Come to think of it, has anyone heard anything BAD about NWN?
Only that it appears to still be using the core WotC D&D rules. Don't get me wrong, I was playing basic (yes, basic) D&D way back in the day, along with the tabletop games that it was based on. The core D&D system of THAC0 and AC is basically a wargaming system designed for medium scale tabletop battles. If you strip it to the core, it's as fast to play as (e.g.) Warhammer. Now, that's fine when you're handling the mechanics yourself, but when you've got a computer available to do the hard work for you, something a little more complex and based on the actual actions you're performing would be nice. Just standing there hitting "swing" is fine for Diablo (or when you're running a party to progress and problem solve rather than for the fun of playing per se), but I'd like a few more options in an RPG.
In addition, the play balance of D&D games is highly dependent on rules interpretations. If you're tough about spellbooks, memorising times and material components, mages are powerful but limited. If however, you forget about them (as BG and BG2 did), then mages become obscenely powerful. Mages treat spells like loose change, casting lingering invisibility and stoneskin before sleeping, for example, then again in the morning, so that they are pretty much permanently invisible and protected. Add to that the potential for offscreen "artillery strikes" with area spells, and you get a character that can control every situation and solo the game without breaking a sweat. There are also a couple of cleric spells that can be abused, and rogue backstab can get - and importantly, can look - silly. NWN should really address that, rather than leaving it up to GM's to insert anti-magic areas all over the place.
On the plus side, NWM appears to be going back to what works. The idea that everything is scriptable makes it pretty much a MUD/MUSH/MOO, and anybody who remembers those (or still plays them) will recognise that as a good sign. I for one am very intrigued by how it will work in practice.
an earlier $2M that got dropped on this crackpottery.
To be fair, most things that NASA does are crackpottery, until they work.
But in this case, they really are pushing the boundaries of credibility.
A (crack)potted history of Podkletnov goes something like this. Podkletnov throws together a bunch of superconducting junk that he has lying around his lab, and spins it up. He then waves some instruments at it, decides that he's seeing a 2% reduction in weight, and ascribes that to a reduction in gravitic mass (he can't test inertial mass, as he can't move the mass).
So far, so good. Stranger things have happened through serendipity. Podkletnov has no theory to explain it, but that's incidental. All he needs to do to obtain credibility is to publish all details of his experiment so that it can be replicated.
He fails to do this.
Instead, he publishes a vague description of the apparatus, and continues to make the claims. He refuses to disclose further details, or to let anyone examine his apparatus. Eventually, his university becomes so tired of his antics that they terminate his employment.
Various people with more money than sense try to replicate the experiment. Nobody who claims to have seen the weight loss will publish their details. Sound familiar? To anyone who reports that they cannot replicate the result, Podkletnov replies that they have the details wrong, but he still won't tell them what the details are.
Enter NASA. With some input from Podkletnov, NASA spends $1 million and thinks it maybe kinda might be seeing a 2e-6 reduction, sorta. Podkletnov suggests a few changes, but he still won't just give them his details, and NASA spend another $1 million, at the end of which, they stop claiming that they even might be seeing an effect.
And so here we are again. Someone's scraped together the spare change from other projects, and they've maybe, kinda, sorta got some details out of Podkletnov now. Or not. Who knows? Probably not NASA, and almost certainly not Podkletnov.
Podkletnov is a poor scientist, but a great publicist. Maybe that's what gets funding in NASA these days. It certainly gets publicity, as this discussion proves.
what you're saying is that NASA have spent $2.6M trying to disprove this "crackpottery" and haven't yet managed to do it
This is what passes for insightful around here? In case you slept through Science 101, the onus is on the discoverer to provide proof in the form of a repeatable experiment. As this has never happened, there's nothing there to disprove. $2.6 million is pocket lint to NASA, this is just someone scraping together the spare change from other projects, not a serious attempt to prove or disprove anything.
would you rather pay $10 for a pirated DVD or go pay $7/person to go see it in the theatre. For those people that have surround sound systems and large tvs, there's not really much argument.
Hey, maybe some of us like spending two hours having our seat kicked, eating $10 popcorn, listening to cellphones going off, and enjoying the rich gossip and giggles of eleven year old girls in an R rated movie. And I'll tell you what, I'd like to shake the hand of the guy that thought up the idea of monthly/annual tickets. No, not the hand, what's the word?... throat.
Every wonder at what point the question became "What's the better experience?" to "What's the least shitty experience?"
Before anyone starts on the "why do you put up with it?", I'll mention that I've seen exactly three movies in theatres in the past three years, one of which was made in Hollywood. The other two were subtitled, which meant I saw them in nearly empty theatres, except for the guy who exclaimed "Is it all in Japanese?" two minutes into Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is really very little reason to cut Hollywood any slack at all any more. Cutting the bullshit out, their argument is this: if we can't control every aspect of your life, we won't keep making content.
Two points. First, that's not true. Greed and coke habits will take care of that. Second, would it really be such a great loss? I don't agree with commercial piracy, but I'm rather at a loss to understand why there's such a market for it.
I was watching a 2 hour Discovery special on the Mars Society Canadian habitat project last night, and I couldn't decide if these guys are visionaries or crackpots.
One some levels, the organisation was impressive, with tons of construction material being airdropped onto an island. The last drop shed it's 'chute and wrecked the construction crane and some other material. Brought up on a diet of space opera (and Junkyard Wars), I expected them to swing into action with a "can do!" plan. What actually happened was that the project manager and society head had a falling out over safety, the construction team walked off, a new architect had to be flown in, and a long debate over what to do next ensued. OK, they did get it all sorted eventually, but the attitude of some of the team really surprised me. After all, this was an "opportunity" rather than a problem (to use management parlance), but some of them seemed to think that it was better to play it safe, call the whole thing off, and try again the next year. Uh, guys, a manned Mars mission wouldn't have that luxury.
And then there were the mock EVA suits that they were using, that were - to be brutally frank - kiddie playtime stuff, being mostly trash can lids and plastic tubing. They were quite honest about this, saying that the idea was merely to try out a lot of activities in the suits to try and predict the problems we'll encounter on Mars. Problem was, they failed to apply lessons that we already know, and started with circa 1950's technology. The big problems were that the helmets fogged up (duh), that it's hard to get items out of your own pockets (so you need mirrors on your wrists, which they knew that NASA suits already have but didn't put on their own suits) and that it's hard to read dim LCD screens through a fogged up helmet.
I really do want to be enthusiastic about the Mars Society, but I can't help but feel that it's a big talking shop and mutual support society for very frustrated people who really wish that some serious money would get put into a Mars mission. It's hard to criticize them for doing something, but it's also hard to take Mars Society seriously when they seem to be more like a Disney Space Camp group having a fun vacation rather than doing bona fide boundary pushing experimentation.
Re:Here's an older collection of spam responses
on
He Writes Back
·
· Score: 2
The part that really concerns me about Moron Shifman is that if you listen to his stalker voicemails (before he loses the plot) he actually comes across as the kind of slimy but plausible motherfucker that clueless management actually does like to give money to, in lieu of spending ten seconds finding someone who has half an idea what they are talking abobut.
It disturbs me that Shifman is actually a genuine consulatant, and that he's making living money. The problem isn't really with him, it's with the lazy ignorant idiots who actually buy his arrogant drawling presentation style. Similarly with spam in general, the problem is that if even one out of a million victims bite, the spammer comes out ahead of the game.
due process is the only thing that ensures that someone who is accused of a crime, is actually (beyond all reasonable doubt) guilty of that crime. If we eliminate it for any crime, then all a crooked cop needs to do is to claim that you committed that crime, and you're locked up
Yes, that's a very good third grade essay. Now answer the question that was asked.
As long as you don't want to ever buy or do anything or go anywhere at all ever again, you'll never have to hand over your <strike> de facto mandatory national ID</strike> completely voluntary driver's license, right?
Easy to scoff until you remember...
on
Soviet Moon Rocket
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
... what have we done recently that's so hot? Shuttle launches still cost a billion bucks a pop (yeah, we're always learning how to save money on the next generation), and all we do is either dick around in low earth orbit or lob probes out.
Maybe I just OD'd on space opera, but to me "space exploration" means letting real people go out there and take real risks, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
One of those little throwaway comments that stuck in my mind was Buzz Aldrin commenting that we're in for a shock when (if) we do try and go back to the moon, because we're going to find out just how hard it was. Sure, we know how to do it, but do we still have the knowhow?
Does anyone else remember from college how the poles just flip every million years or so, and no one really knows why
It's 250,000 years, and (some people will tell you) the field is winding down a bit right now, which is rather a bad thing unless you happen to have a cosmic ray proof bunker.
Every 250,000 years or so, the whole thing reverses polarity. And it's winding down right now, which is possibly a sign that we're due for another one. Don't invest too heavily in homing pigeons.;-)
There's something here we're not seeing
on
ORBZ Shuts Down
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I received an official court notice this afternoon to turn over all information relation to ORBZ accounts. This came from the 10th Judicial District court of the State of Michigan. It appears that ORBZ may be facing
criminal charges for denial of service relating to the Lotus Domino issue.
"It appears"? It is or it isn't. Funnily enough, I'd got the impression that cases were filed before courts ordered documents to be handed over.
Further to that, isn't the case going to be about past behaviour? So isn't taking ORBZ down is response to it a de facto admission of guilt? Is this some sort of preemptive plea bargain attempt?
Ian Gulliver has never struck me as being stupid or cowardly. I can't help but feel that there must be more communication going on here, i.e. an offer to drop the charges if ORBZ just goes away. Frankly, I find that highly distasteful, as it's edging very close to barratry.
I don't blame Ian one bit for shutting down, I just think that he's been shown a carrot as well as a stick so that this never has to reach a court.
I'm all for getting rid of the child porn websites, but I would rather it be done in a way that does not remove the freedom of surfing the web.
I've got a few ideas that involve electrodes, and big pit and a few sacks of lime. If we can stomach denying due process to "illegal combatants" (some of whom we god damn funded not so long ago), why not to the vermin making money off of kiddie porn?
I still have nightmares about developing for the Rendition Verite 1000, which was a lovely graphics decelerator on anything faster than a P100. When we got our first batch of Voodoo 1's delivered, there was a brief but very ugly struggle to get our clammy hands on them. You ain't seen pathetic until you've seen geeks wrestling and squealing like stuck pigs over 4Mb graphics cards, let me tell you.
Question to anyone else who has developed 3D graphics: who did you find driving the demand? In our games house, there was a running battle between the programmers and the artists. Us code monkeys were forever on at the artists to cut down the polygon counts, but they kept trying to slip in models that were barely stripped down from the FMV sequences. In the end, we came to an equitable solution: they won, the game ran at 10fps, and all the programmers left.
I wonder how many other games were ahead of their time in that regard, and how many of them would be rescuable given cards that scoff at polygons and eat dozens of 256x256 textures before breakfast?
Given that ZX81 (aka TS1000) emulators for the PC were around from day dot (or a ZX81 emulator running on an Atari ST emulator running on a PC...) how about 3D Monster Maze? It's not that much more primitive than Doom. Run! Run from the scary Tyrannosaur!
(Yes, I know, the article is probably about hardware that draws triangles real fast, but it's Slashdotted hard, so we may as well have some fun reminiscing. If nothing else, it'll confuse the young 'uns;-) )
... that there are seven versions of every story in court.
Your version.
Your opponent's version.
Your attorney's version.
Your opponent's attorney's version.
The truth.
What actually happened.
And the only one that actually matters:
The one that the judge decides to create from the other six.
You know why judges find people guilty of contempt of court? It's because they can. If you or I could lock people up for contempt of us we'd need a heck of a lot more prisons. Dumb doesn't begin to sum this guy up. Perhaps he's trying to cop a diminished responsibility plea, or perhaps he genuinely doesn't understand that you don't kick the biggest kid in school in the pants then start reading the constitution at him.
Slashdot Mirror
Take it up with the White House. "[The mujahideen, from whence sprange the taliban] are the moral equivalents of our founding fathers,", by a Mr R. Reagan.
Try and remember that Reuters are writing for the record, and that the definitions are always changing. Look at Arafat: terrorist, freedom fighter, or inspired statesman? Depends on whether a peace deal can be brokered, right?
But given that, it sucks even more that they chose to run this as an inflamatory anti-piracy story. Bear in mind though that it's entirely possible that the person who wrote it simply doesn't understand the issues.
I was thinking that robots plural is a misnomer, and that for all practical purposes this is a robot, singular. Sure, it's neat that the parts are separated, but if they act together and are individually useless, that passes the duck test for being a single entity.
As a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty, the United States is obliged to ". . . pursue studies of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies . . . so as to avoid their harmful contamination. . . ". Non-contamination of Europa is already being dealt with
.Right, and my car engine is powered by the chassis. Linux is the kernel, as used in embedded systems (like the 'phone switch I'm working on now), non-X systems (like my home firewall/router), PS2's, and BeOS/Linux systems for that matter.
Strangely enough, I didn't. Support and maintance. I'll be clearer: we're an R&D shop where all the users have to customised installs to one degree or another anyway. Oh, we're not supposed to, we're all supposed to be running NT 4.0 SP 6a, and a few approved apps, but the only trouble with that is that if we stuck to the approved list, we'd be utterly unable to do our jobs, and we'd fold within a month.
Our IS guys know this, and there's a tacit agreement of "Don't ask, don't tell," apart from the irregular software audits. My issue with this is that it's completely farcical. We (development) have to go out of our way to pretend that we can do our job with the corporate approved boxen, which is totally untrue. But nobody in management will actually bitchslap IS and get them to approve what we really need, because that would involve making a decision, and the best way to be wrong is to take a stand, right?
I'm not claiming that this is a common situation, just that it's best to consider the source of any opinion about name brand boxen. They're great for IS, but what's great for IS isn't necessarily what's actually needed by the users.
What planet are you living on? A boilerplate contract (which is what we're talking about) exists solely to protect the party that paid the lawyer that drew it up.
You're missing the main point anyway. The most chilling words an engineer can hear is "Run it past legal," because that's now corporate shorthand for "I want to kill this project, but not leave my greasy fingerprints on it." We're at the stage where lawyers now dictate to development, and the only way to get a project completed is to get it to the stage where the first that legal hears about it that sales contracts have been signed.
R&D is inherently risky and prone to failure and errors (and therefore liability). That's fundamentally incompatible with legal department that will veto anything with an ounce of risk in it, which pretty much means everything involving human beings.
Add in actual legislative regulations (DMCA, Son of SSSCA, export regulations), and it's a bloody miracle that anything gets developed any more. This isn't a good time to be doing development work for any corporation.
Dear Junior, because we can't force you to play nice, we assume you'll play nasty.
Oh yeah, great message. Add in the MPAA/RIAA's "You're all thieves and liars that need to be controlled" and we've arrived at a really enlightened society where everyone you don't have a strangehold on is assumed guilty.
You know, I seem to remember a couple of strange old fashioned concepts called "trust" and "good faith", but then I'm getting on and my mind may be playing tricks on me.
Quite, but I can't understand why it won anything but screenplay and visual effects.
Cinematography? I only saw up-the-nose shots or helicopter flybys. OK, there were a few midrange shots, but the strobe editing managed to disguise that nicely. OK, cinematography also covers location selection, but given that many of the locations were heavily CGI'd, that's a pretty spurious award.
Makeup? Most of it was CGI, and the stuff that wasn't was pretty much Xena level. Of the main characters, only Gimli had serious makeup, and that was mostly wasted because he didn't have a part other than comic relief. Perhaps it was a token award because John Rhys-Davies was allergic to the makeup, and got half his face burned off, or more likely it was just an award on the quantity of makeup used.
Music? Are you kidding? OK, the score itself was appropriate, but the application of it was simply appalling. I have never got so sick of a score so fast, nor sighed with relief at the few moments where they just shut up and let Middle Earth get a few words in. And Enya? I nearly puked. Perhaps "Music (Score)" means "best revenue generating album", but that's hardly good comment on the movie.
Visual effects, fair enough. This was pretty much a CGI film with a few live action actors filling in the blanks.
Speaking of the actors, there really should be awards for "most effective" rather than just "best". I mean, given how little screen time each actor got, it's amazing that they even registered on our consciousness. Consider: Ian McKellen plays a bumbling buffoon who gets everything wrong and then falls down a hole, and yet we still cared, because he was Gandalf. Liv Tyler had a part that barely deserved a credit, and yet she played it to perfection, surprised me greatly in fact, and gave the role a depth that it really didn't deserve for the time it was allowed.
All in all, FotR really deserves an award for "Film that screwed up the least, given that it had everything going against it." I still don't think it was actually anything like enjoyable cinema (although the full director's cut might at least show all of half the sub-plots rather than half of some of the sub-plots), and clearly the academy didn't either, given that it won the "And moving quickly on..." awards.
Funnily enough, the last time I checked with my IS guys, I could put together two complete no-brand systems for what they pay for a full Dell system + support. Given that I spend a lot of time compiling, having two boxen would be a positive benefit. I have the desk space, I have the inclination, and I think we can live with the electricity bill. Worst case, a component fails and I end up with one machine plus a box of spares, with a zero second turnaround, never mind one day.
I suggested this, and got the usual answer: we buy standard Dell boxen because it removes support and maintenance issues.
That sounds fair enough until you consider that I receive exactly zero support for the problems that I have on my machine. We're an R&D shop, and taking risks and pushing things until they go wrong is pretty much what we do for a living. What the IS guys really mean is: nobody ever got fired for buying Dell (/IBM/Microsoft).
Only that it appears to still be using the core WotC D&D rules. Don't get me wrong, I was playing basic (yes, basic) D&D way back in the day, along with the tabletop games that it was based on. The core D&D system of THAC0 and AC is basically a wargaming system designed for medium scale tabletop battles. If you strip it to the core, it's as fast to play as (e.g.) Warhammer. Now, that's fine when you're handling the mechanics yourself, but when you've got a computer available to do the hard work for you, something a little more complex and based on the actual actions you're performing would be nice. Just standing there hitting "swing" is fine for Diablo (or when you're running a party to progress and problem solve rather than for the fun of playing per se), but I'd like a few more options in an RPG.
In addition, the play balance of D&D games is highly dependent on rules interpretations. If you're tough about spellbooks, memorising times and material components, mages are powerful but limited. If however, you forget about them (as BG and BG2 did), then mages become obscenely powerful. Mages treat spells like loose change, casting lingering invisibility and stoneskin before sleeping, for example, then again in the morning, so that they are pretty much permanently invisible and protected. Add to that the potential for offscreen "artillery strikes" with area spells, and you get a character that can control every situation and solo the game without breaking a sweat. There are also a couple of cleric spells that can be abused, and rogue backstab can get - and importantly, can look - silly. NWN should really address that, rather than leaving it up to GM's to insert anti-magic areas all over the place.
On the plus side, NWM appears to be going back to what works. The idea that everything is scriptable makes it pretty much a MUD/MUSH/MOO, and anybody who remembers those (or still plays them) will recognise that as a good sign. I for one am very intrigued by how it will work in practice.
To be fair, most things that NASA does are crackpottery, until they work.
But in this case, they really are pushing the boundaries of credibility.
A (crack)potted history of Podkletnov goes something like this. Podkletnov throws together a bunch of superconducting junk that he has lying around his lab, and spins it up. He then waves some instruments at it, decides that he's seeing a 2% reduction in weight, and ascribes that to a reduction in gravitic mass (he can't test inertial mass, as he can't move the mass).
So far, so good. Stranger things have happened through serendipity. Podkletnov has no theory to explain it, but that's incidental. All he needs to do to obtain credibility is to publish all details of his experiment so that it can be replicated.
He fails to do this.
Instead, he publishes a vague description of the apparatus, and continues to make the claims. He refuses to disclose further details, or to let anyone examine his apparatus. Eventually, his university becomes so tired of his antics that they terminate his employment.
Various people with more money than sense try to replicate the experiment. Nobody who claims to have seen the weight loss will publish their details. Sound familiar? To anyone who reports that they cannot replicate the result, Podkletnov replies that they have the details wrong, but he still won't tell them what the details are.
Enter NASA. With some input from Podkletnov, NASA spends $1 million and thinks it maybe kinda might be seeing a 2e-6 reduction, sorta. Podkletnov suggests a few changes, but he still won't just give them his details, and NASA spend another $1 million, at the end of which, they stop claiming that they even might be seeing an effect.
And so here we are again. Someone's scraped together the spare change from other projects, and they've maybe, kinda, sorta got some details out of Podkletnov now. Or not. Who knows? Probably not NASA, and almost certainly not Podkletnov.
Podkletnov is a poor scientist, but a great publicist. Maybe that's what gets funding in NASA these days. It certainly gets publicity, as this discussion proves.
This is what passes for insightful around here? In case you slept through Science 101, the onus is on the discoverer to provide proof in the form of a repeatable experiment. As this has never happened, there's nothing there to disprove. $2.6 million is pocket lint to NASA, this is just someone scraping together the spare change from other projects, not a serious attempt to prove or disprove anything.
Hey, maybe some of us like spending two hours having our seat kicked, eating $10 popcorn, listening to cellphones going off, and enjoying the rich gossip and giggles of eleven year old girls in an R rated movie. And I'll tell you what, I'd like to shake the hand of the guy that thought up the idea of monthly/annual tickets. No, not the hand, what's the word? ... throat.
Every wonder at what point the question became "What's the better experience?" to "What's the least shitty experience?"
Before anyone starts on the "why do you put up with it?", I'll mention that I've seen exactly three movies in theatres in the past three years, one of which was made in Hollywood. The other two were subtitled, which meant I saw them in nearly empty theatres, except for the guy who exclaimed "Is it all in Japanese?" two minutes into Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is really very little reason to cut Hollywood any slack at all any more. Cutting the bullshit out, their argument is this: if we can't control every aspect of your life, we won't keep making content.
Two points. First, that's not true. Greed and coke habits will take care of that. Second, would it really be such a great loss? I don't agree with commercial piracy, but I'm rather at a loss to understand why there's such a market for it.
I was watching a 2 hour Discovery special on the Mars Society Canadian habitat project last night, and I couldn't decide if these guys are visionaries or crackpots.
One some levels, the organisation was impressive, with tons of construction material being airdropped onto an island. The last drop shed it's 'chute and wrecked the construction crane and some other material. Brought up on a diet of space opera (and Junkyard Wars), I expected them to swing into action with a "can do!" plan. What actually happened was that the project manager and society head had a falling out over safety, the construction team walked off, a new architect had to be flown in, and a long debate over what to do next ensued. OK, they did get it all sorted eventually, but the attitude of some of the team really surprised me. After all, this was an "opportunity" rather than a problem (to use management parlance), but some of them seemed to think that it was better to play it safe, call the whole thing off, and try again the next year. Uh, guys, a manned Mars mission wouldn't have that luxury.
And then there were the mock EVA suits that they were using, that were - to be brutally frank - kiddie playtime stuff, being mostly trash can lids and plastic tubing. They were quite honest about this, saying that the idea was merely to try out a lot of activities in the suits to try and predict the problems we'll encounter on Mars. Problem was, they failed to apply lessons that we already know, and started with circa 1950's technology. The big problems were that the helmets fogged up (duh), that it's hard to get items out of your own pockets (so you need mirrors on your wrists, which they knew that NASA suits already have but didn't put on their own suits) and that it's hard to read dim LCD screens through a fogged up helmet.
I really do want to be enthusiastic about the Mars Society, but I can't help but feel that it's a big talking shop and mutual support society for very frustrated people who really wish that some serious money would get put into a Mars mission. It's hard to criticize them for doing something, but it's also hard to take Mars Society seriously when they seem to be more like a Disney Space Camp group having a fun vacation rather than doing bona fide boundary pushing experimentation.
The part that really concerns me about Moron Shifman is that if you listen to his stalker voicemails (before he loses the plot) he actually comes across as the kind of slimy but plausible motherfucker that clueless management actually does like to give money to, in lieu of spending ten seconds finding someone who has half an idea what they are talking abobut.
It disturbs me that Shifman is actually a genuine consulatant, and that he's making living money. The problem isn't really with him, it's with the lazy ignorant idiots who actually buy his arrogant drawling presentation style. Similarly with spam in general, the problem is that if even one out of a million victims bite, the spammer comes out ahead of the game.
Yes, that's a very good third grade essay. Now answer the question that was asked.
As long as you don't want to ever buy or do anything or go anywhere at all ever again, you'll never have to hand over your <strike> de facto mandatory national ID</strike> completely voluntary driver's license, right?
... what have we done recently that's so hot? Shuttle launches still cost a billion bucks a pop (yeah, we're always learning how to save money on the next generation), and all we do is either dick around in low earth orbit or lob probes out.
Maybe I just OD'd on space opera, but to me "space exploration" means letting real people go out there and take real risks, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
One of those little throwaway comments that stuck in my mind was Buzz Aldrin commenting that we're in for a shock when (if) we do try and go back to the moon, because we're going to find out just how hard it was. Sure, we know how to do it, but do we still have the knowhow?
It's 250,000 years, and (some people will tell you) the field is winding down a bit right now, which is rather a bad thing unless you happen to have a cosmic ray proof bunker.
Every 250,000 years or so, the whole thing reverses polarity. And it's winding down right now, which is possibly a sign that we're due for another one. Don't invest too heavily in homing pigeons. ;-)
"It appears"? It is or it isn't. Funnily enough, I'd got the impression that cases were filed before courts ordered documents to be handed over.
Further to that, isn't the case going to be about past behaviour? So isn't taking ORBZ down is response to it a de facto admission of guilt? Is this some sort of preemptive plea bargain attempt?
Ian Gulliver has never struck me as being stupid or cowardly. I can't help but feel that there must be more communication going on here, i.e. an offer to drop the charges if ORBZ just goes away. Frankly, I find that highly distasteful, as it's edging very close to barratry.
I don't blame Ian one bit for shutting down, I just think that he's been shown a carrot as well as a stick so that this never has to reach a court.
I've got a few ideas that involve electrodes, and big pit and a few sacks of lime. If we can stomach denying due process to "illegal combatants" (some of whom we god damn funded not so long ago), why not to the vermin making money off of kiddie porn?
I still have nightmares about developing for the Rendition Verite 1000, which was a lovely graphics decelerator on anything faster than a P100. When we got our first batch of Voodoo 1's delivered, there was a brief but very ugly struggle to get our clammy hands on them. You ain't seen pathetic until you've seen geeks wrestling and squealing like stuck pigs over 4Mb graphics cards, let me tell you.
Question to anyone else who has developed 3D graphics: who did you find driving the demand? In our games house, there was a running battle between the programmers and the artists. Us code monkeys were forever on at the artists to cut down the polygon counts, but they kept trying to slip in models that were barely stripped down from the FMV sequences. In the end, we came to an equitable solution: they won, the game ran at 10fps, and all the programmers left.
I wonder how many other games were ahead of their time in that regard, and how many of them would be rescuable given cards that scoff at polygons and eat dozens of 256x256 textures before breakfast?
Given that ZX81 (aka TS1000) emulators for the PC were around from day dot (or a ZX81 emulator running on an Atari ST emulator running on a PC...) how about 3D Monster Maze? It's not that much more primitive than Doom. Run! Run from the scary Tyrannosaur!
(Yes, I know, the article is probably about hardware that draws triangles real fast, but it's Slashdotted hard, so we may as well have some fun reminiscing. If nothing else, it'll confuse the young 'uns ;-) )
... that there are seven versions of every story in court.
And the only one that actually matters:
You know why judges find people guilty of contempt of court? It's because they can. If you or I could lock people up for contempt of us we'd need a heck of a lot more prisons. Dumb doesn't begin to sum this guy up. Perhaps he's trying to cop a diminished responsibility plea, or perhaps he genuinely doesn't understand that you don't kick the biggest kid in school in the pants then start reading the constitution at him.