I went to college so I didn't have to sort garbage all my life.
Isn't that a little like saying 'I will not go potty! I went to college so I didn't have to go potty ever again!' ?
There are some things that are endemic to the human condition - and learning how to properly manage one's personal waste stream is usually considered an important PART of education...
Development was unceremoniously dropped in 2002 due to "budget cuts".
Right at the height of post-9/11 paranoia while the military budget was being expanded and the Unitary Executive (tm) gave themselves unprecedented powers? Yeah sure it was "dropped"... dropped right on Mars! Whoosh! With OUR heat-ray!
He's talking about developing general technologies and capabilities that would be useful for a wide variety of missions outside of Mars, and if nobody wants to pull the trigger on the Mars mission in 20 years, we still have all the technology and capabilities.
Agreed. JK2 managed to reference both the original Dark Forces (the running around Imperial bases solving puzzles and shooting like Han Solo - even a 'Dark Trooper' like mass-production plot) and JK1 (big levels, Force powers and sabers and the Valley of the Jedi mysticism) and have beautiful textures and saber combat which was actually fun.
(We pass delicately over the frankly crap levels like the garbage masher and Code Room. Nar Shadaa Streets and Starport more than made up for those).
Playing the Dark Forces mod for JA reminded me of just how hard it is to design good levels and especially how hard it is to translate the feel of another game - yet JK2 pulled that off, with a story, and made it look easy.
it's annoying that if you activate Force Damage Reduction - er, Protection - your "Force energy" doesn't recharge, so you can't really use any other powers.
Annoying yes, but tactically interesting, especially for multiplayer - essentially Protection/Absorb/Speed/Sense put you into a 'defensive' stance by locking up your Force recharge, so you know when you see the aura that the other player won't be using offensive spells, er, Force powers. So the game becomes like fencing - feint, guard, block, circle, watch for an opening.
At least I assume, having not played JA multiplayer. Though I still prefer Outcast to Academy for the single-player experience. Academy's SP campaign felt too 'videogamey', and the double-sabers just felt cheaply overpowered and not true to the movies (the only good movies, the original trilogy).
Also, don't have health bar. Have a "defence" bar; whenever something would had hit you, you deflect it with the lightsaber/Force Push, and when the bar's empty, only then does a hit get through, at which point you die instantly. A minor change, but it would fit the theme much better, and would also justify the modern "stop getting hit to heal" mechanic.
There are other possible improvements, but these would be something to start with.
Now that one is much more interesting, and I'd like to see something like that implemented. Get rid of the whole Wolfenstein-inherited 'run around taking ridiculous amounts of damage then heal' mechanic.
So the question is, will we adapt the technology to allow the creation and maintenance of a variety of different personae, or will we adapt our own behavior so as to present one consistent, universally acceptable persona to the world?
So, we all have to be honest with each other? The horror!
Why'd they freak out? If it doesn't keep falling over (and it shouldn't), it's not as if it'll suddenly fall over tomorrow just because Microsoft stops supporting it.
You've never had to apply monthly security patches, I take it?
The good old common sense days of "if it's not obviously broken, it doesn't need fixing" are LONG gone. Nowadays, if it's not obviously broken, it's only because the hackers who are running a botnet on it have been smart enough not to leave traces; you can assume with 100% certainty that every critical system you still run shipped with major security flaws on day one and which are eventually going to come to light.
Support ending means the odds of the black hats rather than the white hats finding those flaws first is now also 100%.
Wealth is ultimately the blood, sweat, and tears of somebody working their behind off to make something, and all of the rest of money flows from that effort.
Quite so. With the proviso that it's not just 'somebody' but 'something' - all the plants and animals in the ecosystem are part of the equation as well, since all the human labour in the world can't magic cotton or corn or fish or fresh water or even oxygen out of thin atoms.
And right now we're busy trashing all those silent, unsung cellular workers which are contributing to our GDP without being recognised for it. Too much more trashing, and some of 'em are going to go on strike, permanently.
This has nothing to do with civilian spinoffs and everything to do with being able to park off Unhappy Country X's coast and proceed to make them even more unhappy without dragging that pesky petroleum supply chain.
Popper's notion of science is, frankly, obsolete. It was already obsolete when I was reading Philosophy of Science in the 1970s. He envisages a world in which falsifying an hypothesis invalidates a theory. But modern science - and this includes quantum mechanics as well as climatology - depends on statistical analysis and probability theory. You could almost say that when Schroedinger and Heisenberg defined the Uncertainty Principle and the probabilitistic Wave Equation, physics changed in a way that obsoleted Popper and the whole Victorian idea of science.
That's one way of reading Popper. But my (admittedly naive and very once-over-lightly) impression from glancing at Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics is that Popper fundamentally disagreed with the way Heisenberg, Bohr and von Neumann reinterpreted science, and that he would strongly argue that his point of view was not only not obsolete - but that the new statistical interpretation was just plain wrong. He is particularly scathing towards Bohr's "end of the road thesis" - which in hindsight, does indeed look ludicrous - and von Neumann's claim that hidden variables were impossible the year before new particles were discovered and quickly integrated into the very model which von Neumann claimed could admit no such additions!
Einstein of course would agree. He never trusted Bohr's arguments either.
So I think "Popper's model is obsolete" is actually looking less and less true as time goes on and the influence of some of the bigger egos who both founded and clouded 20th century physics dies off.
So this system requires CPUs to burn scarce, real electricity in order to generate virtual electronic tokens whose only purpose is to simulate the scarcity of rare metals, so that we can continue to use the old 'exchange value' economic model in the realm of information where by definition, it does not apply.
This seems like basing an economy on burning one's food crops to prove wealth and using the ash to buy things. I'm sure it would 'work', for some definition of work, but it doesn't seem particularly... efficient. Or sensible. Granted, humans do indulge in self-destructive behaviour, but do we really have to port all our bad habits into the digital world?
Is there some actual upside to this system which I'm not getting?
The problem with this is that in 10 years time it will be cheaper to get a LAMP administrator than it will to get a IIS/MSSQL administrator.
That's nice, but remind me again how I log in to an enterprise directory and host a desktop on a LAMP server?
HTML5 is nice, but not everything can be replaced with the Web. Turn off the Active Directory and how many Fortune 500 companies would be able to run for a single hour?
Slashdot Mirror
I went to college so I didn't have to sort garbage all my life.
Isn't that a little like saying 'I will not go potty! I went to college so I didn't have to go potty ever again!' ?
There are some things that are endemic to the human condition - and learning how to properly manage one's personal waste stream is usually considered an important PART of education ...
Development was unceremoniously dropped in 2002 due to "budget cuts".
Right at the height of post-9/11 paranoia while the military budget was being expanded and the Unitary Executive (tm) gave themselves unprecedented powers? Yeah sure it was "dropped"... dropped right on Mars! Whoosh! With OUR heat-ray!
Ok, I can dream...
He's talking about developing general technologies and capabilities that would be useful for a wide variety of missions outside of Mars, and if nobody wants to pull the trigger on the Mars mission in 20 years, we still have all the technology and capabilities.
I'd be happy just with 1985's Orbital Transfer Vehicle.
Think you guys will have one of those built by 2030?
What could be scarier than VAMPIRE mosquitos!
oh wait
well, we could end up with ZOMBIE VAMPIRE mosquitos perhaps. Swat 'em and they come back...
Let me just mention this:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/CellCraft/cellcraft
Someone needs to make this into an MMORPG and there's Biology 101 done. Next, quantum mechanics.
Agreed. JK2 managed to reference both the original Dark Forces (the running around Imperial bases solving puzzles and shooting like Han Solo - even a 'Dark Trooper' like mass-production plot) and JK1 (big levels, Force powers and sabers and the Valley of the Jedi mysticism) and have beautiful textures and saber combat which was actually fun.
(We pass delicately over the frankly crap levels like the garbage masher and Code Room. Nar Shadaa Streets and Starport more than made up for those).
Playing the Dark Forces mod for JA reminded me of just how hard it is to design good levels and especially how hard it is to translate the feel of another game - yet JK2 pulled that off, with a story, and made it look easy.
oops, missed a quote tag. Paragraphs 4-5 are parent's.
it's annoying that if you activate Force Damage Reduction - er, Protection - your "Force energy" doesn't recharge, so you can't really use any other powers.
Annoying yes, but tactically interesting, especially for multiplayer - essentially Protection/Absorb/Speed/Sense put you into a 'defensive' stance by locking up your Force recharge, so you know when you see the aura that the other player won't be using offensive spells, er, Force powers. So the game becomes like fencing - feint, guard, block, circle, watch for an opening.
At least I assume, having not played JA multiplayer. Though I still prefer Outcast to Academy for the single-player experience. Academy's SP campaign felt too 'videogamey', and the double-sabers just felt cheaply overpowered and not true to the movies (the only good movies, the original trilogy).
Also, don't have health bar. Have a "defence" bar; whenever something would had hit you, you deflect it with the lightsaber/Force Push, and when the bar's empty, only then does a hit get through, at which point you die instantly. A minor change, but it would fit the theme much better, and would also justify the modern "stop getting hit to heal" mechanic.
There are other possible improvements, but these would be something to start with.
Now that one is much more interesting, and I'd like to see something like that implemented. Get rid of the whole Wolfenstein-inherited 'run around taking ridiculous amounts of damage then heal' mechanic.
We will exist in the shadows, not interacting with any real people.
Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your journal.
Under an assumed name and post office box number, of course.
So the question is, will we adapt the technology to allow the creation and maintenance of a variety of different personae, or will we adapt our own behavior so as to present one consistent, universally acceptable persona to the world?
So, we all have to be honest with each other? The horror!
Why'd they freak out? If it doesn't keep falling over (and it shouldn't), it's not as if it'll suddenly fall over tomorrow just because Microsoft stops supporting it.
You've never had to apply monthly security patches, I take it?
The good old common sense days of "if it's not obviously broken, it doesn't need fixing" are LONG gone. Nowadays, if it's not obviously broken, it's only because the hackers who are running a botnet on it have been smart enough not to leave traces; you can assume with 100% certainty that every critical system you still run shipped with major security flaws on day one and which are eventually going to come to light.
Support ending means the odds of the black hats rather than the white hats finding those flaws first is now also 100%.
Good luck.
Wealth is ultimately the blood, sweat, and tears of somebody working their behind off to make something, and all of the rest of money flows from that effort.
Quite so. With the proviso that it's not just 'somebody' but 'something' - all the plants and animals in the ecosystem are part of the equation as well, since all the human labour in the world can't magic cotton or corn or fish or fresh water or even oxygen out of thin atoms.
And right now we're busy trashing all those silent, unsung cellular workers which are contributing to our GDP without being recognised for it. Too much more trashing, and some of 'em are going to go on strike, permanently.
Which would be bad for us.
Why hydrogen indeed. One reason comes to mind:
You can make it on today's nuclear-powered warships.
This has nothing to do with civilian spinoffs and everything to do with being able to park off Unhappy Country X's coast and proceed to make them even more unhappy without dragging that pesky petroleum supply chain.
Now you can do it with UAVs and nukes too.
Everyone wins!
Popper's notion of science is, frankly, obsolete. It was already obsolete when I was reading Philosophy of Science in the 1970s. He envisages a world in which falsifying an hypothesis invalidates a theory. But modern science - and this includes quantum mechanics as well as climatology - depends on statistical analysis and probability theory. You could almost say that when Schroedinger and Heisenberg defined the Uncertainty Principle and the probabilitistic Wave Equation, physics changed in a way that obsoleted Popper and the whole Victorian idea of science.
That's one way of reading Popper. But my (admittedly naive and very once-over-lightly) impression from glancing at Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics is that Popper fundamentally disagreed with the way Heisenberg, Bohr and von Neumann reinterpreted science, and that he would strongly argue that his point of view was not only not obsolete - but that the new statistical interpretation was just plain wrong. He is particularly scathing towards Bohr's "end of the road thesis" - which in hindsight, does indeed look ludicrous - and von Neumann's claim that hidden variables were impossible the year before new particles were discovered and quickly integrated into the very model which von Neumann claimed could admit no such additions!
Einstein of course would agree. He never trusted Bohr's arguments either.
So I think "Popper's model is obsolete" is actually looking less and less true as time goes on and the influence of some of the bigger egos who both founded and clouded 20th century physics dies off.
Demonstrating that parallel/concurrent programming is still hard even when you do it with people!
So this system requires CPUs to burn scarce, real electricity in order to generate virtual electronic tokens whose only purpose is to simulate the scarcity of rare metals, so that we can continue to use the old 'exchange value' economic model in the realm of information where by definition, it does not apply.
This seems like basing an economy on burning one's food crops to prove wealth and using the ash to buy things. I'm sure it would 'work', for some definition of work, but it doesn't seem particularly... efficient. Or sensible. Granted, humans do indulge in self-destructive behaviour, but do we really have to port all our bad habits into the digital world?
Is there some actual upside to this system which I'm not getting?
The technical term is 'data wedgie'.
But now you're not constrained to identifying yourself with some bogus fqdn with a limiting TLD stuck on it.
I think you've hit on the exact opposite of the definition of 'bogus' there.
A keyword can be spoofed by anyone. A URL, not so much.
Hey now! I enjoyed paying for the Sprawl Trilogy and Burning Chrome!
"synergize... [their] product offerings while remaining the provider of choice for world-class enterprise solutions."
That's military code for "launch nukes at Russia", isn't it?
They used the word 'cyberspace' without irony - twice.
Glad they're Gibson fans I guess.
And you should see what happens when he has to harvest his Farmville.
Since nobody has referenced "Melancholy Elephants" yet, I will.
Gets more and more apropos every day, it seems.
using an audio source playing White Metal
Well, there's your problem right there. Did you try some '70s funk or acid house?
The problem with this is that in 10 years time it will be cheaper to get a LAMP administrator than it will to get a IIS/MSSQL administrator.
That's nice, but remind me again how I log in to an enterprise directory and host a desktop on a LAMP server?
HTML5 is nice, but not everything can be replaced with the Web. Turn off the Active Directory and how many Fortune 500 companies would be able to run for a single hour?