Militarizing the space in near-earth orbit and creating a military highly dependant on satellites is just stupid.
Oh, wake the hell up.
News flash: Reconnaissance satellites are *weapons*. They are also *not new*. They've been around for decades, so space has already been 'militarized.' The Russians had a working anti-satellite program back in the *late 1960s*. We were succesfully killing satellites with missiles back in the mid-80s. The notion that this 'militarization of space' is anything that has its roots in the current administration bespeaks a woeful ignorance of recent history.
A few missles that blast millions of ball-bearings into to orbit, and the entire planet will be locked out of space for hundreds, or even thousands of years
No, it wouldn't. There are any number of ways to deal with that scenario, ranging from heavier armored satellites to different target orbits to cheap pop-up satellites that you can launch from submarines and don't have to survive for more than a fraction of an orbit. None of these are as good an option as what we do now, but the suggestion that all someone would have to do to prevent all access to space for millennia is set off a few rockets full of ball-bearings is absolutely ridiculous.
And I'd be okay with even that, assuming that for the rest of the week, it. Just. Worked.
It doesn't. The fact that they can't keep their shit up for even the time between regular maintenance intervals is pretty damning.
I can't even come up with what you'd need to take the entire system down for 6 hours at a time for, it not regular rebuilds of the database on the backend; hardware doesn't fail that much or that regularly.
I am, however, interested in seeing how D&D Online is as it's a Turbine game
It's awful. I'm not even sure why they called it D&D, 'cause it's not. Let's just break down some of the problems.
1st: Leveling is ridiculously slow. In actual D&D, you hit second level after 1000 xp. In Stormreach, it's 10,000xp. Then the discrepancy just grows. To offset this, they give you, basically, minilevels every 20% of the way through each one of your real levels. At each minilevel, you get an action point to spend on some ability that doesn't exist in D&D, arcade-like real-time fighting stuff like a 30% increase to attack speed 5 times a day. But you can only have 4 of these abilities at any given time, so the action points are mostly spent on shuffling around some pretty inconsequential abilities.
2nd: The slow leveling and inflated xp requirements would be okay, really, especially considering the level cap is only 10 (that, at least, is D&D-like; 10th level is supposed to be pretty powerful), except for the fact that there's no way to gain xp other than completing quests. So you do a quest. Then you repeat it. Then you repeat it some more. Then you repeat it. You do this until you level. Then you keep doing it. It's really quite awful; I can't even imagine what playing an alt would be like. In most MMORPGs, you get a bit bored with your main, you start an alt, and you're *not* sick of the beginning game. In this one, I'm already bored with my 2nd-level main, but the thought of starting an alt and going through the same dungeons over and over again makes me throw up a little in my mouth.
3rd: Real-time combat is ridiculous. I'm sorry, but D&D combat is planned, regimented, ruled by dice. Why spend all that money on getting a license, and then completely throw out the well-established and popular mechanics of the system? Attacks of opportunity, flanking, sneak attacks, deciding between full-move and other actions, all that wonderful tactical depth is out the window, replaced by mash-the-right-mouse-button-as-fast-as-you-can.
4th: Given that the importance of things like 'rounds' is out the window due to the above decision, it's silly to stick to them in other contexts, like when my 6-wisdom fighter got hit with a -6 wisdom debuff, and found himself unable to do *anything* until it wore off. Couldn't talk to NPCs. Couldn't open doors. Couldn't even swing his hammer. Yeah, waiting around for *30 minutes* of real-time before I can play the game again is brilliant.
5th: Spell points? Get the fuck out here with that shit. 1st-level wizards in D&D simply cannot cast 24 magic missiles before they have to rest. If you want wizards who can do that, fine, but then why insist on calling that D&D, when it's not?
On one hand, I'm curious as to how things play out at higher levels. On the other hand, I'm not curious enough to spend any more money or time to find out.
Maybe that's because cable and especially phone (911 !) is a little more important than a friggin' online game?
Really?
911, sure, but that's a service that's funded by tax dollars, and is required by law to work. If you have a phone, with a line connected to it, dialing 911 is supposed to work. You don't need to subscribe to any phone service. You don't need long-distance service. You don't even need local dialtone. It just has to work.
So let's drop that from the comparison. Now it doesn't sound so universally important as you make it out to be. Especially cable. Play a friggin' online game, or watch some friggin' Law & Order: Grotesque Ritual Murders Unit, or call friggin' Mabel from work and gossip about that cute guy in the mail room? Seems about equally important to me. And yet two of those things have far, far more than 95% uptime.
A large part of the problem is that Blizzard's communication with the player base sucks, to speak frankly. The login server for their forums seems to be one and the same as the login server for the game itself, so when that goes down the forums tend to shut down as well. There is a "Realm Status" page which purports to show the real-time status of the various servers, but which is frequently unreachable. There is a "Realm Status" forum which *might* contain some acknowledgement of a problem while the problem is still ongoing, but usually doesn't. When you start up the game client, Blizzard can stick up a 'News' window on your screen but, again, the appearance of any news often lags the problem, even severe problems, by a matter of hours. And, of course, Blizzard's chief form of communication with players is Community Managers on the forums, who themselves tend to be given dick in the way of information, are extremely controlled in what they can and cannot say, and who are (honestly, I'm not joking), tasked with yelling at users for stuff posting subject headers that contain excessive capitalization; what an obscene waste of resources.
Seriously, a little timely information goes a long way. Yes, I agree that the downtime they have is absurd; consider that *every Tuesday* the game goes offline for *six hours* of maintenance. That's *planned, scheduled* downtime, folks, so that *alone* means they aren't even attempting to have greater than 96.4% uptime, and I can't think of another commercial service for which you pay a monthly fee where that would be even remotely acceptable; if your cable or your phone just plain didn't work for 6 hours every Tuesday, heads would roll. Then things just get asinine when you factor in all the spontaneous, freewheeling, unplanned downtime as well.
But know what? I'd feel a lot better about it if, when something shits the bed, or goes tits-up, or whatever colorful metaphor you'd use to describe a server-killing technical problem, Blizzard would tell us, promptly, as they receive the information themselves:
1. We know there's a problem. 2. We know what the proglem is. 3. Here's what we're doing to fix it. 4. Here's when we expect it to be fixed. 5. Update as old information is obsolete.
They don't do this. A few hours after something happens, you might get some of the above information. Or you might not. Usually, it's the latter.
Okay, I can almost understand why somebody might want to buy gold to cut out some of the more boring aspects of play and get them to their epic mount that much more quickly. But that's not all that these sludge barons offer. Aside from gold, they'll sell you a ready-made level-60 character if you wish. Or they'll even take your low-level character and play it for you, without you ever having to lift a finger. Hey, why confine this practice to MMOs? Why not pay an experienced Counter-Strike player to rack up several thousand frags in your name to earn you a killer online rep? Oh, that's right -- because it defeats the whole point of playing the game in the first place.
Here, I thought that the point of playing the game was to have fun.
Clearly, nobody purchases fragging services in Counterstrike because that would not be fun. You'd be paying someone to play the game for you.
Just as clearly, people do purchase gold from gold farmers because grinding for gold...isn't fun. Grinding faction isn't fun.
The fact that gold farmers exist, the fact that leveling services exist, these things speak to deficiencies in the game design. There's this game, that people are paying millions each month to play, and yet on top of the monthly fee many of them feel that it is worth additional money to pay others to essentially play part of the game for them. Why? Because that part of the game isn't fun.
If MMORPG designers want to eliminate farmers, they need to look at what parts of the game people are paying them to play, figure out why those parts of the game aren't fun, and change them to make the fun. Bitching about people who are willing to provide a service at a rate people are willing to pay is, like in every other aspect of life, silly.
Compared to MP3 players, the sound quality is vastly better (OK, maybe "vast" is an overstatement, but for someone into hi-fi, try listening to a decent MD recording or a decent MP3 recording - the MD is clearly better; even my 9-year old deck sounds better than any MP3 I've heard, and I've heard a few).
What?
MP3 is a lossy perceptual encoding format. ATRAC is a lossy perceptual encoding format. What sort of mp3s are you comparing MD to?
ATRAC is 292kbps. If you can tell the difference between it and a 292kbps mp3, blind, I'll be impressed.
Now taking a more pragmatic approach, how many 'key' systems do you think your government really has plugged into the internet willy-nilly?
Do you honestly think the only way to significant impact Western societies and/or economies is to attack 'key' government systems?
IT security is in a piss-poor state across the board, whether we're talking about 'key' government systems or non-'key' civilian systems. For the US military to *fail* to look into that weakness would be a grotesque dereliction of duty.
While it hasn't yet been modded up enough for me to see it, I'm sure there's already a bunch of whining about how us eeevul hegemonistic Americans are all set to sally forth trampling across the internet in our zeal to wage war.
Sorry, this is just being smart. Keep in mind how prevalent botnets are, how they basically rule all of Asia, Eastern Europe, most of South America, and even substantial chunks of America and Western Europe. Keep in mind how much spam those networks churn out on a daily basis, how much money they earn the people who own them. Then realize that spam is about the *least* harmful thing they could be used for.
The problem I had was that so little information regarding the storyline existed in the game. You play a smart guy, PhD in theoretical physics, you fight back invaders from Xen, travel to another world/dimension, kill the Big Bad, and then wake up to find you're back on earth and there's this gigantic building in the middle of town that's growing and this organization called the Combine spitting out tripods to impale people. It's natural that, well, you'd have a few questions to ask. But you don't. You don't utter a single word in the whole game. People tell you a few things, but they're the only source of exposition.
Take a look at the backstory: probably about 90% of it is stuff that you could only learn from sources external to the game: web pages, forums, official information from Valve. But in the game, you're wandering around Combine prison/death camps, and there're no documents you can read, no computers you can activate to look for information. Nobody's left logs or notebooks around.
Half-life 2 was a good game. But, absent the graphics, System Shock 2 was a *better* game. You felt like you were actually figuring stuff out, solving the mystery of "What the hell just happened?", instead of just riding a train to a set destination. If the player is expected to acquire knowledge of the backstory that will improve his enjoyment of the game, that knowledge should be conveyed in the game. When playing F.E.A.R., I found out about the plot by playing the game, not by going to external web pages in order to learn who Alma is.
"The thermonuclear fusion will take place in a series of pulses, each pulse being triggered by laser energy, and/or energetic particles reflected from a previous pulse. The system will be arranged so that the fusion process will decay after each pulse so that the stability of the system is maintained."
Pulsed inertial confinement fusion is just a fancy version of Orion, and is what the British Interplanetary Society used in their Daedalus spacecraft concept. Given the 1973 date, the same year as the start of Project Daedalus, I imagine the 'inventor' was a member of the Society.
Being obligated to the stockholders is not at all the same thing as being obligated to stock analysts. When Google's prospectus says "We're not going to be providing the forecasts you're used to," you have the choice to become a stockholder, or not. If you choose to buy stock, well, you've been forewarned that your stock doesn't hold much voting power, and that you're not going to get the kind of forecasts you used to, and those are matters between you and Google.
Google has no responsibility that I can see towards providing analysts with all the information they'd like to have.
Read the section on Bremsstrahlung losses in that first link. For He3:He3 fusion, Pfusion/PBrem = 0.72, at a temperature and pressure which minimizes those losses. And
The actual ratios of fusion to Bremsstrahlung power will likely be significantly lower for several reasons. For one, the calculation assumes that the energy of the fusion products is transmitted completely to the fuel ions, which then lose energy to the electrons by collisions, which in turn lose energy by Bremsstrahlung. However because the fusion products move much faster than the fuel ions, they will give up a significant fraction of their energy directly to the electrons. Secondly, the plasma is assumed to be composed purely of fuel ions. In practice, there will be a significant proportion of impurity ions, which will lower the ratio. In particular, the fusion products themselves must remain in the plasma until they have given up their energy, and will remain some time after that in any proposed confinement scheme. Finally, all channels of energy loss other than Bremsstrahlung have been neglected. The last two factors are related. On theoretical and experimental grounds, particle and energy confinement seem to be closely related. In a confinement scheme that does a good job of retaining energy, fusion products will build up. If the fusion products are efficiently ejected, then energy confinement will be poor, too.
Obtaining net energy from He3:He3 fusion appears to be a practical impossibility.
My ISP, Panix, will gladly sell you a shell account. You can SSH into it, or telnet, if you don't care. And yet, they're not rooted every 30 minutes. Or, ever.
If giving someone SSH access is 30 minutes away from giving them root, that's not secure.
1) "Hot" fusion works, but a practical solution is always 20 years away. (However, they then go on to say that the current target date for a workable solution is 2050 -- 44 years from now.)
Which is where it's been since we started thinking about it: 40-50 years from now. Fusion, real controlled commercially viable fusion power, as opposed to just an interesting source of neutrons, is fantasically difficult. Hell, forget the difficulty of actually sustaining the reaction; we don't even have a good idea of what materials to build the reactor out of; over the life of the reactor vessel, every single atom in it will be struck and displaced by neutrons up to 500 times, and that does very bad things to all known materials; austinitic steels start to swell and degrade after only 30 dpa, and the best candidates we know of can only handle 150 dpa. And ITER doesn't even come close to generating the number of neutrons necessary to test these things in a reasonable time frame; there's another facility due to be built to explore this single issue, but there's not even a completed design yet, let alone an ECD.
So we don't even know what to *build* a real fusion reactor, as opposed to a test vessel, out of, and we haven't even spoke of how difficult the actual fusion process is to get useful energy out of. Brehmstrallung losses mean that, really, D-T fusion is the only real candidate, so all those fancy aneutronic schemes that enable you to extract energy directly from charged particles, and all the non-equilibrium schemes, will result in a net energy loss.
Fusion isn't just hard, it's *really really really* hard. By comparison, the Manhattan Project was just a trivial engineering problem. There are aspects of fusion power, like that materials issue I mentioned, for which a solution just might not exist.
but the economics are vastly overstated and there's no disposal solution.
There are plenty of disposal solutions. The amount of nuclear waste generated per unit of electricity is absolutely piddling. You could take the stuff and dump it into a subduction zone, or even just into some random abyssal trench, and you'd end up doing far less environmental damage than we're doing right now with fossil fuels, for which the "disposal solution" is "vent the waste directly into the atmosphere." Just because a cost is widely distributed, doesn't make it any less of a cost. Just because you kill people all over the planet, instead of just around the power plants, doesn't mean they're any less dead.
Nope. For the longest-distance transmission lines, you see DC being used. There comes a point when the capacitive losses you get from using AC encourage you to switch to DC, and for lines of several hundred miles, you start seeing DC transmission lines.
Re:And make sure it burns up on re-entry too!
on
Golf in Space
·
· Score: 1
A-fucking-men. The notion that any competetive activity is a "sport" is a nonsense that ends with things like chess and curling being considered sports.
I'm with Carlin on this one, there are only three sports. Football; baseball; and basketball. Everything else is either a game or an activity. Golf is definitely not a goddamned sport.
Carlin's characterization of golf is also dead on: "It's like watching flies fuck."
What's the *point* of a console?
on
Review - Full Auto
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You know, I read stuff like this, and it occurs to me that I just Don't Get It:
Vehicles respond in a realistic fashion, explosions bloom, shrapnel flies, all while you speed along the track... the system is placed under a heavy load not just occasionally but frequently in this title. Knowing that, the pausing that takes place when in a heavy combat situation is intolerable. At times there is a disquieting 'driving through butter' sensation as the action slides to a crawl. This slowdown doesn't take place during every crash or explosion, but it happens often enough to be a distraction from the only thing this game has going for it.
Snuh? WTF? Why would you go through all the expense of designing, manufacturing, and marketing a console system, for the advantages of a known, discrete, and predictable hardware set, making an API to market to developers, all so that you can release games that the hardware can't keep up with? Sure, I know that on my PC, I can't run Battlefield 2 at 1600x1200 resolution with all the eye candy turned up to max with 4x antialiasing and expect to achieve a playable framerate. But some other people *can*; maybe those people want to spend extra money for dual Geforce 7800s in SLI mode. Maybe they've got their own liquid nitrogen cooling rig for their 7.2 kW power supply. There are people who can do that sort of thing, and moreover, want to do that sort of thing, so when PC games push the limits of current hardware, at least there's a market for it.
But with Xbox 360 or PS3, nobody can do that. You can't sell a new video card to 360 owners by telling them it will let them run games better. You can't sell games to 360 owners by telling them their 360 can't quite run it fast enough.
So why do such games get released? I for one know that if I'd just spent all that money on a new console, only to find that it chunks like a fudge factory on offically-licensed software, I would not be happy at all.
Except that the worst estimates say that if we switched over to 100% nuclear today, we'd have about 100 years of fuel for the most basic power plants.
At, and here's an important bit, present fuel costs.
As fuel costs increase, reserves go up, because stuff that wasn't worth exploiting before now is. Fuel costs don't even have to increase too much before uranium extraction from seawater becomes economical, to about $400/lb. The amount of uranium in the oceans at this moment is enough to power the entire world's current energy demand for 7 million years, about 5E9 tons of the stuff.
There's enough uranium around that by the time we run out of it, we'll be able to construct large-scale solar power satellites and ginormous groundside microwave rectennas. And we don't have to confine ourselves to uranium; there's even more thorium around than uranium, and while that won't sustain a chain reaction, it'll fission just fine in an energy amplifier, and you can breed more fissile fuel in the process.
It's doubtful that we'll ever get fusion working, but there's so much fission fuel around capable of driving one plant design or another that if we haven't figured out solar collection satellites by the time we start feeling the pinch of running out of it, we'll deserve to go extinct.
"He comments that lasting 5 billion years, i.e. longer than the sun will support life on earth, should cause uranium to be considered a renewable resource."
Felber's research shows that any mass moving faster than 57.7 percent of the speed of light will gravitationally repel other masses lying within a narrow 'antigravity beam' in front of it. The closer a mass gets to the speed of light, the stronger its 'antigravity beam' becomes.
Moving faster than 57.7% of c? Relative to what?
Right now, the earth is moving through space at a speed greater than 57.7% relative to something. No, I don't know what, or where, but rest assured there's some body out there somewhere in whose frame of reference the Earth is moving at greater than 57.7% of c. And there's some other body in whose frame of reference the Earth is moving at greater than 10% of c, and another body where Earth is moving at 95% of c, and another body where Earth isn't moving at all (Hey, like me!).
So why isn't the Earth emitting such an antigravity beam, repelling masses in its path? Rest assured that if it were, we'd be seeing its effect, like ferinstance as it played havoc with GPS satellites.
Or, heck, there are cosmic rays which occasionally smack into the Earth's atmosphere at a speed that's only infinitesimally smaller than c in Earth's FOR. They should *definitely* be emitting some sort of antigravity, if this guy's correct. Should be trivial to observe, but we haven't seen it.
Yes, but 1G is an enormously difficult acceleration to sustain for any length of time. Any technology capable of sustaining that for even a few days, let alone a few months, and still delivering a useful payload, would definitely be in the indistinguishable-from-magic regime.
All you folks throwing around the formula for non-relativistic kinetic energy when the topic of discussion is high-gamma travel are really misssing the whole point of relativity.
The proper formula for kinetic energy is
ke = {1/sqrt((1-v^2)/(c^2))-1) * mc^2
For a one pound object traveling at.5c, relativistic KE is 6.3E15 joules.
Of course, this doesn't detract from your point at all, but we're definitely in the regime where relativistic effects are at play.
Slashdot Mirror
Militarizing the space in near-earth orbit and creating a military highly dependant on satellites is just stupid.
Oh, wake the hell up.
News flash: Reconnaissance satellites are *weapons*. They are also *not new*. They've been around for decades, so space has already been 'militarized.' The Russians had a working anti-satellite program back in the *late 1960s*. We were succesfully killing satellites with missiles back in the mid-80s. The notion that this 'militarization of space' is anything that has its roots in the current administration bespeaks a woeful ignorance of recent history.
A few missles that blast millions of ball-bearings into to orbit, and the entire planet will be locked out of space for hundreds, or even thousands of years
No, it wouldn't. There are any number of ways to deal with that scenario, ranging from heavier armored satellites to different target orbits to cheap pop-up satellites that you can launch from submarines and don't have to survive for more than a fraction of an orbit. None of these are as good an option as what we do now, but the suggestion that all someone would have to do to prevent all access to space for millennia is set off a few rockets full of ball-bearings is absolutely ridiculous.
Call, Fax or write each of the sponser, tell them you like the bill.
Dear Lord, don't do that. Tell them you hate it. snuck the Broadcast Flag into it.
Screw that. Tell your Congressmen to support net neutrality and to fight against the broadcast flag.
And I'd be okay with even that, assuming that for the rest of the week, it. Just. Worked.
It doesn't. The fact that they can't keep their shit up for even the time between regular maintenance intervals is pretty damning.
I can't even come up with what you'd need to take the entire system down for 6 hours at a time for, it not regular rebuilds of the database on the backend; hardware doesn't fail that much or that regularly.
I am, however, interested in seeing how D&D Online is as it's a Turbine game
It's awful. I'm not even sure why they called it D&D, 'cause it's not. Let's just break down some of the problems.
1st: Leveling is ridiculously slow. In actual D&D, you hit second level after 1000 xp. In Stormreach, it's 10,000xp. Then the discrepancy just grows. To offset this, they give you, basically, minilevels every 20% of the way through each one of your real levels. At each minilevel, you get an action point to spend on some ability that doesn't exist in D&D, arcade-like real-time fighting stuff like a 30% increase to attack speed 5 times a day. But you can only have 4 of these abilities at any given time, so the action points are mostly spent on shuffling around some pretty inconsequential abilities.
2nd: The slow leveling and inflated xp requirements would be okay, really, especially considering the level cap is only 10 (that, at least, is D&D-like; 10th level is supposed to be pretty powerful), except for the fact that there's no way to gain xp other than completing quests. So you do a quest. Then you repeat it. Then you repeat it some more. Then you repeat it. You do this until you level. Then you keep doing it. It's really quite awful; I can't even imagine what playing an alt would be like. In most MMORPGs, you get a bit bored with your main, you start an alt, and you're *not* sick of the beginning game. In this one, I'm already bored with my 2nd-level main, but the thought of starting an alt and going through the same dungeons over and over again makes me throw up a little in my mouth.
3rd: Real-time combat is ridiculous. I'm sorry, but D&D combat is planned, regimented, ruled by dice. Why spend all that money on getting a license, and then completely throw out the well-established and popular mechanics of the system? Attacks of opportunity, flanking, sneak attacks, deciding between full-move and other actions, all that wonderful tactical depth is out the window, replaced by mash-the-right-mouse-button-as-fast-as-you-can.
4th: Given that the importance of things like 'rounds' is out the window due to the above decision, it's silly to stick to them in other contexts, like when my 6-wisdom fighter got hit with a -6 wisdom debuff, and found himself unable to do *anything* until it wore off. Couldn't talk to NPCs. Couldn't open doors. Couldn't even swing his hammer. Yeah, waiting around for *30 minutes* of real-time before I can play the game again is brilliant.
5th: Spell points? Get the fuck out here with that shit. 1st-level wizards in D&D simply cannot cast 24 magic missiles before they have to rest. If you want wizards who can do that, fine, but then why insist on calling that D&D, when it's not?
On one hand, I'm curious as to how things play out at higher levels. On the other hand, I'm not curious enough to spend any more money or time to find out.
Maybe that's because cable and especially phone (911 !) is a little more important than a friggin' online game?
Really?
911, sure, but that's a service that's funded by tax dollars, and is required by law to work. If you have a phone, with a line connected to it, dialing 911 is supposed to work. You don't need to subscribe to any phone service. You don't need long-distance service. You don't even need local dialtone. It just has to work.
So let's drop that from the comparison. Now it doesn't sound so universally important as you make it out to be. Especially cable. Play a friggin' online game, or watch some friggin' Law & Order: Grotesque Ritual Murders Unit, or call friggin' Mabel from work and gossip about that cute guy in the mail room? Seems about equally important to me. And yet two of those things have far, far more than 95% uptime.
A large part of the problem is that Blizzard's communication with the player base sucks, to speak frankly. The login server for their forums seems to be one and the same as the login server for the game itself, so when that goes down the forums tend to shut down as well. There is a "Realm Status" page which purports to show the real-time status of the various servers, but which is frequently unreachable. There is a "Realm Status" forum which *might* contain some acknowledgement of a problem while the problem is still ongoing, but usually doesn't. When you start up the game client, Blizzard can stick up a 'News' window on your screen but, again, the appearance of any news often lags the problem, even severe problems, by a matter of hours. And, of course, Blizzard's chief form of communication with players is Community Managers on the forums, who themselves tend to be given dick in the way of information, are extremely controlled in what they can and cannot say, and who are (honestly, I'm not joking), tasked with yelling at users for stuff posting subject headers that contain excessive capitalization; what an obscene waste of resources.
Seriously, a little timely information goes a long way. Yes, I agree that the downtime they have is absurd; consider that *every Tuesday* the game goes offline for *six hours* of maintenance. That's *planned, scheduled* downtime, folks, so that *alone* means they aren't even attempting to have greater than 96.4% uptime, and I can't think of another commercial service for which you pay a monthly fee where that would be even remotely acceptable; if your cable or your phone just plain didn't work for 6 hours every Tuesday, heads would roll. Then things just get asinine when you factor in all the spontaneous, freewheeling, unplanned downtime as well.
But know what? I'd feel a lot better about it if, when something shits the bed, or goes tits-up, or whatever colorful metaphor you'd use to describe a server-killing technical problem, Blizzard would tell us, promptly, as they receive the information themselves:
1. We know there's a problem.
2. We know what the proglem is.
3. Here's what we're doing to fix it.
4. Here's when we expect it to be fixed.
5. Update as old information is obsolete.
They don't do this. A few hours after something happens, you might get some of the above information. Or you might not. Usually, it's the latter.
No, that's not illegal, it's just a tort. Big difference.
Here, I thought that the point of playing the game was to have fun.
Clearly, nobody purchases fragging services in Counterstrike because that would not be fun. You'd be paying someone to play the game for you.
Just as clearly, people do purchase gold from gold farmers because grinding for gold...isn't fun. Grinding faction isn't fun.
The fact that gold farmers exist, the fact that leveling services exist, these things speak to deficiencies in the game design. There's this game, that people are paying millions each month to play, and yet on top of the monthly fee many of them feel that it is worth additional money to pay others to essentially play part of the game for them. Why? Because that part of the game isn't fun.
If MMORPG designers want to eliminate farmers, they need to look at what parts of the game people are paying them to play, figure out why those parts of the game aren't fun, and change them to make the fun. Bitching about people who are willing to provide a service at a rate people are willing to pay is, like in every other aspect of life, silly.
Compared to MP3 players, the sound quality is vastly better (OK, maybe "vast" is an overstatement, but for someone into hi-fi, try listening to a decent MD recording or a decent MP3 recording - the MD is clearly better; even my 9-year old deck sounds better than any MP3 I've heard, and I've heard a few).
What?
MP3 is a lossy perceptual encoding format. ATRAC is a lossy perceptual encoding format. What sort of mp3s are you comparing MD to?
ATRAC is 292kbps. If you can tell the difference between it and a 292kbps mp3, blind, I'll be impressed.
Now taking a more pragmatic approach, how many 'key' systems do you think your government really has plugged into the internet willy-nilly?
Do you honestly think the only way to significant impact Western societies and/or economies is to attack 'key' government systems?
IT security is in a piss-poor state across the board, whether we're talking about 'key' government systems or non-'key' civilian systems. For the US military to *fail* to look into that weakness would be a grotesque dereliction of duty.
While it hasn't yet been modded up enough for me to see it, I'm sure there's already a bunch of whining about how us eeevul hegemonistic Americans are all set to sally forth trampling across the internet in our zeal to wage war.
Sorry, this is just being smart. Keep in mind how prevalent botnets are, how they basically rule all of Asia, Eastern Europe, most of South America, and even substantial chunks of America and Western Europe. Keep in mind how much spam those networks churn out on a daily basis, how much money they earn the people who own them. Then realize that spam is about the *least* harmful thing they could be used for.
The problem I had was that so little information regarding the storyline existed in the game. You play a smart guy, PhD in theoretical physics, you fight back invaders from Xen, travel to another world/dimension, kill the Big Bad, and then wake up to find you're back on earth and there's this gigantic building in the middle of town that's growing and this organization called the Combine spitting out tripods to impale people. It's natural that, well, you'd have a few questions to ask. But you don't. You don't utter a single word in the whole game. People tell you a few things, but they're the only source of exposition.
Take a look at the backstory: probably about 90% of it is stuff that you could only learn from sources external to the game: web pages, forums, official information from Valve. But in the game, you're wandering around Combine prison/death camps, and there're no documents you can read, no computers you can activate to look for information. Nobody's left logs or notebooks around.
Half-life 2 was a good game. But, absent the graphics, System Shock 2 was a *better* game. You felt like you were actually figuring stuff out, solving the mystery of "What the hell just happened?", instead of just riding a train to a set destination. If the player is expected to acquire knowledge of the backstory that will improve his enjoyment of the game, that knowledge should be conveyed in the game. When playing F.E.A.R., I found out about the plot by playing the game, not by going to external web pages in order to learn who Alma is.
Trademark laws exist to protect the consumer, not the producer.
Funny then how it's the producer who gets to trademark the term and extract fees from would-be offendors.
"The thermonuclear fusion will take place in a series of pulses, each pulse being triggered by laser energy, and/or energetic particles reflected from a previous pulse. The system will be arranged so that the fusion process will decay after each pulse so that the stability of the system is maintained."
Pulsed inertial confinement fusion is just a fancy version of Orion, and is what the British Interplanetary Society used in their Daedalus spacecraft concept. Given the 1973 date, the same year as the start of Project Daedalus, I imagine the 'inventor' was a member of the Society.
Being obligated to the stockholders is not at all the same thing as being obligated to stock analysts. When Google's prospectus says "We're not going to be providing the forecasts you're used to," you have the choice to become a stockholder, or not. If you choose to buy stock, well, you've been forewarned that your stock doesn't hold much voting power, and that you're not going to get the kind of forecasts you used to, and those are matters between you and Google.
Google has no responsibility that I can see towards providing analysts with all the information they'd like to have.
Obtaining net energy from He3:He3 fusion appears to be a practical impossibility.
So SSH was on and accessible?
My ISP, Panix, will gladly sell you a shell account. You can SSH into it, or telnet, if you don't care. And yet, they're not rooted every 30 minutes. Or, ever.
If giving someone SSH access is 30 minutes away from giving them root, that's not secure.
1) "Hot" fusion works, but a practical solution is always 20 years away. (However, they then go on to say that the current target date for a workable solution is 2050 -- 44 years from now.)
Which is where it's been since we started thinking about it: 40-50 years from now. Fusion, real controlled commercially viable fusion power, as opposed to just an interesting source of neutrons, is fantasically difficult. Hell, forget the difficulty of actually sustaining the reaction; we don't even have a good idea of what materials to build the reactor out of; over the life of the reactor vessel, every single atom in it will be struck and displaced by neutrons up to 500 times, and that does very bad things to all known materials; austinitic steels start to swell and degrade after only 30 dpa, and the best candidates we know of can only handle 150 dpa. And ITER doesn't even come close to generating the number of neutrons necessary to test these things in a reasonable time frame; there's another facility due to be built to explore this single issue, but there's not even a completed design yet, let alone an ECD.
So we don't even know what to *build* a real fusion reactor, as opposed to a test vessel, out of, and we haven't even spoke of how difficult the actual fusion process is to get useful energy out of. Brehmstrallung losses mean that, really, D-T fusion is the only real candidate, so all those fancy aneutronic schemes that enable you to extract energy directly from charged particles, and all the non-equilibrium schemes, will result in a net energy loss.
Fusion isn't just hard, it's *really really really* hard. By comparison, the Manhattan Project was just a trivial engineering problem. There are aspects of fusion power, like that materials issue I mentioned, for which a solution just might not exist.
but the economics are vastly overstated and there's no disposal solution.
There are plenty of disposal solutions. The amount of nuclear waste generated per unit of electricity is absolutely piddling. You could take the stuff and dump it into a subduction zone, or even just into some random abyssal trench, and you'd end up doing far less environmental damage than we're doing right now with fossil fuels, for which the "disposal solution" is "vent the waste directly into the atmosphere." Just because a cost is widely distributed, doesn't make it any less of a cost. Just because you kill people all over the planet, instead of just around the power plants, doesn't mean they're any less dead.
For moving power over long distances, AC is king.
Nope. For the longest-distance transmission lines, you see DC being used. There comes a point when the capacitive losses you get from using AC encourage you to switch to DC, and for lines of several hundred miles, you start seeing DC transmission lines.
A-fucking-men. The notion that any competetive activity is a "sport" is a nonsense that ends with things like chess and curling being considered sports.
I'm with Carlin on this one, there are only three sports. Football; baseball; and basketball. Everything else is either a game or an activity. Golf is definitely not a goddamned sport.
Carlin's characterization of golf is also dead on: "It's like watching flies fuck."
Snuh? WTF? Why would you go through all the expense of designing, manufacturing, and marketing a console system, for the advantages of a known, discrete, and predictable hardware set, making an API to market to developers, all so that you can release games that the hardware can't keep up with? Sure, I know that on my PC, I can't run Battlefield 2 at 1600x1200 resolution with all the eye candy turned up to max with 4x antialiasing and expect to achieve a playable framerate. But some other people *can*; maybe those people want to spend extra money for dual Geforce 7800s in SLI mode. Maybe they've got their own liquid nitrogen cooling rig for their 7.2 kW power supply. There are people who can do that sort of thing, and moreover, want to do that sort of thing, so when PC games push the limits of current hardware, at least there's a market for it.
But with Xbox 360 or PS3, nobody can do that. You can't sell a new video card to 360 owners by telling them it will let them run games better. You can't sell games to 360 owners by telling them their 360 can't quite run it fast enough.
So why do such games get released? I for one know that if I'd just spent all that money on a new console, only to find that it chunks like a fudge factory on offically-licensed software, I would not be happy at all.
Except that the worst estimates say that if we switched over to 100% nuclear today, we'd have about 100 years of fuel for the most basic power plants.
At, and here's an important bit, present fuel costs.
As fuel costs increase, reserves go up, because stuff that wasn't worth exploiting before now is. Fuel costs don't even have to increase too much before uranium extraction from seawater becomes economical, to about $400/lb. The amount of uranium in the oceans at this moment is enough to power the entire world's current energy demand for 7 million years, about 5E9 tons of the stuff.
There's enough uranium around that by the time we run out of it, we'll be able to construct large-scale solar power satellites and ginormous groundside microwave rectennas. And we don't have to confine ourselves to uranium; there's even more thorium around than uranium, and while that won't sustain a chain reaction, it'll fission just fine in an energy amplifier, and you can breed more fissile fuel in the process.
It's doubtful that we'll ever get fusion working, but there's so much fission fuel around capable of driving one plant design or another that if we haven't figured out solar collection satellites by the time we start feeling the pinch of running out of it, we'll deserve to go extinct.
Details.
"He comments that lasting 5 billion years, i.e. longer than the sun will support life on earth, should cause uranium to be considered a renewable resource."
Uranium recovery from seawater.
Moving faster than 57.7% of c? Relative to what?
Right now, the earth is moving through space at a speed greater than 57.7% relative to something. No, I don't know what, or where, but rest assured there's some body out there somewhere in whose frame of reference the Earth is moving at greater than 57.7% of c. And there's some other body in whose frame of reference the Earth is moving at greater than 10% of c, and another body where Earth is moving at 95% of c, and another body where Earth isn't moving at all (Hey, like me!).
So why isn't the Earth emitting such an antigravity beam, repelling masses in its path? Rest assured that if it were, we'd be seeing its effect, like ferinstance as it played havoc with GPS satellites.
Or, heck, there are cosmic rays which occasionally smack into the Earth's atmosphere at a speed that's only infinitesimally smaller than c in Earth's FOR. They should *definitely* be emitting some sort of antigravity, if this guy's correct. Should be trivial to observe, but we haven't seen it.
This smells like bullshit.
Yes, but 1G is an enormously difficult acceleration to sustain for any length of time. Any technology capable of sustaining that for even a few days, let alone a few months, and still delivering a useful payload, would definitely be in the indistinguishable-from-magic regime.
All you folks throwing around the formula for non-relativistic kinetic energy when the topic of discussion is high-gamma travel are really misssing the whole point of relativity.
.5c, relativistic KE is 6.3E15 joules.
The proper formula for kinetic energy is
ke = {1/sqrt((1-v^2)/(c^2))-1) * mc^2
For a one pound object traveling at
Of course, this doesn't detract from your point at all, but we're definitely in the regime where relativistic effects are at play.