In that case, the game only gets better if the player loses a lot -- and most games try to make sure the player doesn't lose too much
Most games throw the best AI the company was able to produce at the player, then increase the difficulty level by progressively stacking cheats in the AI's favor. That's a testament to just how bad the AI actually is.
If you had an actual decent AI, the process would be reversed: instead of throwing cheats the AI's way as the difficulty increased, you'd toss it penalties as the difficulty *decreased*. You'd use the best AI you could develop at all difficulty levels, but penalize it more and more as the player dials down the difficulty.
It would fairly easy to write the perfect RTS opponent who never makes mistakes and beats the player every single time, but nobody would play that game.
Only if the AI cheated, and this isn't a reflection of the skill used in programming the AI but in how badly the deck has been stacked in it's favor. There's a reason why the harder difficulty levels in most games give the AI big advantages (e.g., twice the mining resources, half the cost of units, etc.): it's because game house *can't* write an AI that's able to out-think a decent player, if both the AI and the human start with the same conditions and play under the same set of rules. And even if someone manages to accomplish this feat in the future, the AI will still be non-adaptive and fundamentally flawed (easily defeated by the first loophole or golden tactic found).
Why on Earth would you want it to make mistakes?Seriously, the only time I hear gamers complaining that a game is "too hard" is either when cheats stack things in the AI's favor so badly they're glaringly obvious, or when the player is simply too incompetent to ever come close to mastering the game.
Give me better AI, not AI that's both stupid AND deliberately designed to fuck up. Or is it that you're trying to simulate the lowest common denominator among gamers?
Then some whiners came along and said 'The AI is only beating me because it's cheating!'
Only an idiot would play poker against someone who had a few extra decks stuffed up their sleeves. The challenge is meaningless when the opponent cheats.
It's nice to see that the patent office actually rejects some claims from time to time. Although I'm willing to bet more than a few Apple fanboys will cry "foul!" because their beloved company didn't get it's way this time.
copying the ebook is a crime and students can be punished for it.
So is downloading music and movies, and yet 70% of all Americans who have an internet connection do it at least occasionally. Like the laws governing file sharing, this one will largely be ignored.
I don't know what color the sky is in your world, but SuSE is by far and away the easiest and most user-friendly of the distros. YAST really sets SuSE apart by being the best installation and configuration tool around. I've tinkered with just about every distro under the sun and I always come back to SuSE at the end of the day.
As with all of these moves, the point isn't to improve the security or safety of the average citizen, but to make it easier for the government to track every aspect of that citizens life. Criminals will find ways to circumvent the new devices, making them useless for any other purpose.
The more you know about a person, the easier it is to control them. And I think it's painfully apparent at this point that our government has a vested, intense interest in making sure it can control each and every one of us in order to preserve the status quo (people in power stay in power, the rest of us remain proles forever).
Tinfoil-hat stuff, I know, but with every one of these stories I wonder more and more often if the paranoids don't have it right.
the population of the internet needs to come together to ensure that the internet supports their ideals.
The internet is not, has never been, and (the gods willing) will never be a democracy. The vast majority of folks who use various internet services don't get to decide shit except for what the latest 'cool' trend is (e.g., blogging); they have no input or say whatsoever in any of the technical decisions that go into how the internet will function.
This is a *good* thing. Most of these people aren't even remotely competent enough to contribute to the discussion, much less have a say in the decision. They haven't earned the right to sit at the table, something which (fortunately) isn't granted to them the moment they turn 18.
Even divorcing the discussion from the technical details the internet *still* isn't a democracy. Since no one-world government exists there isn't one set of laws to bring us all into the darkness and bind us; hell, even national laws within national borders are a joke on the internet, primarily just a springboard for random police/FBI showmanship. Only a fool could say with a straight face that any national law passed in the last twenty years has served to substantially modify behavior on the internet.
As it stands the internet is a mix of a millions of little dictatorships, some larger than others, connected together through a bizarre form of organized non-government, the infrastructure of the whole thing being built upon the arcane deliberations of a very specific set of wizards. And so far as I can see it seems to be doing just fine - much better, in fact, than many government-dominated endeavors.
The CAN-SPAM law specfically restricts these sorts of lawsuits to ISPs, but I'm not certain of the details.
It actually gives a special status to the lawsuit brought by an ISP against a spammer, allowing the suit to be covered under CAN-SPAM rather than local law.
It's unfortunately to have your right to sue removed
The U.S. government can't selectively remove your right to sue while allowing others to retain that right. It's unconstitutional. And in any event it isn't what CAN-SPAM does.
The idea is that women tend to work fewer hours/take longer leaves than men, and this leads to the difference.
Single women take less leave than single men do. Single men get sick more often, tend to contract serious illnesses more commonly than women do, and die younger. If you have a choice between a single woman and a single man and you're looking for dependability then a woman is the better bet.
Where the situation reverses is when your employee is a married woman with children. That's because even in this 'enlightened' age husbands expect the wives to take time off of work to care for children; very few couples have an 'equal time' policy. The husband simply assumes that whatever he's doing is more important and that it's the wife's obligation to take time from work when the kids need it.
If you compare single woman with children and single men with children (the latter being a pretty small sample size) then you're back to men taking more time from work than women. In this case the men not only have to care for their children without aid, but since they themselves get sick more often they end up taking more leave.
The only other consistent difference between the two sexes is leave due to pregnancy, but in this case it should be pretty bloody apparent to just about anyone with a few neurons to rub together why a woman just might take more pregnancy-related leave than a man.
My point was I find it amusing someone is comparing Yahoo Mail and their accompanying services to GMail. Do you often compare the intellect of your six year old with that of your one year old? Let's see how complete GMail's calendar and related offerings are in a few more years.
You missed the point. The user doesn't give a shit if GMail hasn't had time to catch up to Yahoo services. All the user (rightly) cares about is which one is more useful and user-friendly. And that makes a comparison entirely appropriate, just like any other product review. Gmail doesn't 'get a break' just because it hasn't been on the block as long as Yahoo.
Except that as I understand it this so-called levy is backed by government force. Stores aren't allowed to sell imported American CD-Rs and bypass the levy imposed by the 'private organization'.
This is splitting hairs. A levy is a tax by any other name. Calling it something different doesn't actually make it a different thing. In the end a government body is demanding money from you under penalty of law if certain specific conditions are met - and that's a tax, no matter what they decide to call it. In fact, it appears to be a kind of property tax, in that if you choose to purchase the property you have to pay the tax (although not annually, for obvious reasons).
- this is a good thing because competition is a good thing. Having a single search engine dominate the market is just as bad as having a single browser dominate the market; and
- anything which competes with my Lord and God Google is evil and must be struck down! Death to the infidel Yahoo!
Yep, looks like someone's been poking the Google fanboy hive with a stick again....
Anyway, why don't you re-try this argument when GMail has been around as long as Yahoo mail. I'd say for "playing catch-up" to Yahoo mail, Google has done a fucking brilliant job.
We're supposed to give 'em a pat on the back and use Google search over Yahoo search because Google is "brilliant" at playing the catch-up game, and just might some day offer the same suite of services that Yahoo does? What the fuck are you smoking?
Economic profit is not the only motivator for exploration and technological development, nor is it the only justification for a permanent offworld presence.
I disagree. While I approve of using my tax dollars to fund the exploration of the solar system via probe, I don't approve of the enormous outlay required to do that exploration with human beings. There isn't any justification (in my mind) for doing with humans what can be done much, much cheaper with robots; and even if there were some small scientific gain to be had when using humans I don't think it justifies the cost.
The rest of the solar system offers us space, raw materials, and energy in near unlimited quantities.
That would be an economic incentive for the exploitation of space, would it not?
Also, the Earth is a source of single point failure... one ecological or climatological collapse or a comet or astroid collision, and the human race could cease to exist, and those little green pictures of dead presidents will be of little use, value, or comfort.
Your money would be better spent keeping the Earth from getting hit by some nasty comet or asteroid than in trying to move millions off-world.
And hell, if you think big enough, terraforming is always a possibility.
Where, exactly? You can't terraform Venus; it's tidelocked. And Mars is too small. If you want to terraform Mars you're going to have to rebuild all the atmosphere it's lost to space, probably by throwing thousands of comets at it from the Oort Cloud - and that means you'd have to remove all the current colonists for the few centuries it'd take to complete the task. While it might someday become practical, it would be more efficient to colonize Mars without terraforming it.
When I look to the future, I want "Star Trek"
When I look to the future I want "Battlestar Galactica". Hot cylon babes like Boomer, hoowah!
The problem is you need a huge initial investment, and you get no return. None. It doesn't matter if you can mine mineral X on Mars, it'll always be cheaper to get it from Earth (or the asteroid belt). You invest, and you never get back what you invested. The colony may become self-sufficient (will become self-sufficient, if it's large enough) but there isn't anything on Mars that can't be gotten elsewhere cheaper.
But current technology won't advance if we don't start trying to do these things.
There's no evidence whatsoever that technology will fail to progress simply because we aren't colonizing other worlds in the Sol Sytem.
If by "valid" you mean "I can make whatever mouth noises I want", then you're right. However, if by "valid" you mean "accurately reflects reality", then no, your opinion isn't necessarily as valid... its validity will depend on its accuracy, not on the identity of the speaker.
Okay, here's why my opinion is more valid than the doomsayers.
- Every single prediction of woe and grief put out by the population control folks has been WRONG. During the '60's they said that carrying capacity would be reached in the early eighties, and things would shortly collapse thereafter; during the '70's they said it would happen in the '90's, and during the '80's they were sure we were all going to be fucked by the year 2000. Stretch back to the year 1900 and they were sure that the Earth couldn't handle more than four billion people, even with strict governmental control over the consumption of resources.
Yet here we are in 2005 and not a single prediction they've made has come to pass. They've been wrong about the population numbers, about carrying capacity, about technology, and about the grand collapse of all things human EVERY SINGLE TIME. It's amusing that they don't even bother to acknowledge their persistent failures at prediction; they just revise their numbers and start all over again, conveniently ignoring the fact that they've never managed to get any of it right.
- every person whose said that the scaremongers were wrong has been RIGHT.
Simple logic tells me that I'm far more likely to be on the money if I think the population control fanatics are full of shit than if I buy into their crap this time around.
Well, let's look at what has actually happened in the last 40 years, shall we?
Currently the doubling rate for knowledge in most scientific fields is between 18 and 24 months. Do you know what that means? It means, for example, that in the next two years we'll learn as much about computer science as we have in all of previous human history combined. Two years after that we'll do it again - effectively quadrupling our knowledge in four years. And so on. More interesting, the rate of doubling is continually declining.
This is true of most scientific or technical fields. It's a real phenomenon that's getting more and more attention as time goes by because it doesn't seem to be stumbling into any roadblocks (i.e., predicted plateaus).
Ultimately what it means is that only a fool would predict the next 40 years based on the last 40 years. The doubling period was considerably longer 40 years ago than it is today, and will be much shorter 40 years in the future; technological improvement *is not a linear progression but an asymptotic one*.
Making predictions 20, 30 or 40 years in the future based on what's right in front of our noses today is about as accurate as the psychic predictions laid out in the Weekly World News.
People who have studied these things say we're in trouble
The lunatic fringe has been screaming about how some critical system in the ecology or human society is going to collapse since the '60's - and every single time they've been just plain wrong. So they revise their estimates, hoping that people don't notice that they've got egg all over their face, and go back to predicting Armageddon just like any other mad little preacher. Hell, they've been ominously pontificating about ugly mass death due to overpopulation since Malthus, and not only has it not happened but they can't even get the simple things right - like basic math, or the decline in growth rates.
we're all seriously screwed.
All of the end-of-the-world types predict this. It's not exactly new or original. They deserve about as much credence as the sign-carrying idiot who stands on the street corner shouting "The end times are nigh!"
This clause makes no sense. Technology is not limited by the fact that we don't have populations in space. Technological advancement won't halt simply because we haven't bothered to put a station down on the surface of Mars.
then we run out of resources.
Again, you're assuming that technological development will never find a solution to dwindling resources. For all we know in the next 20 or 30 years nanotechnology will be used to turn iron and copper atoms into gold, palladium, and irridium. Tailored bacteria may be used to 'mine' landfills (in fact, some of that is being tested right now). The scientists working on practical fusion may finally get around to making a working, profitable reactor.
We don't *know* what's coming, but if the past is any indication it isn't just incremental changes to what we have right at this moment. The doubling of scientific knowledge in most fields is between 18 and 24 months, and the period is decreasing; no one, including you or me, can make even the vaguest predictions as to what will be possible in 20 years.
All chicken-little scenarios rely on a massive technological freeze that defies all common sense, not to mention every scrap of historical data since the Industrial Revolution. We can confidently say that technology will continue to improve, and that the period of doubling will continue to decline, for the foreseeable future; and that what we can imagine in the next 20 or 30 or 40 years will be dwarfed by what is actually accomplished.
Slashdot Mirror
I have nothing against you getting great single player games, but I want my games to focus on MP goodness.
Well, if you're looking for opponents even dumber than your average game AI, MP is definitely the way to go....
Max
In that case, the game only gets better if the player loses a lot -- and most games try to make sure the player doesn't lose too much
Most games throw the best AI the company was able to produce at the player, then increase the difficulty level by progressively stacking cheats in the AI's favor. That's a testament to just how bad the AI actually is.
If you had an actual decent AI, the process would be reversed: instead of throwing cheats the AI's way as the difficulty increased, you'd toss it penalties as the difficulty *decreased*. You'd use the best AI you could develop at all difficulty levels, but penalize it more and more as the player dials down the difficulty.
Max
It would fairly easy to write the perfect RTS opponent who never makes mistakes and beats the player every single time, but nobody would play that game.
Only if the AI cheated, and this isn't a reflection of the skill used in programming the AI but in how badly the deck has been stacked in it's favor. There's a reason why the harder difficulty levels in most games give the AI big advantages (e.g., twice the mining resources, half the cost of units, etc.): it's because game house *can't* write an AI that's able to out-think a decent player, if both the AI and the human start with the same conditions and play under the same set of rules. And even if someone manages to accomplish this feat in the future, the AI will still be non-adaptive and fundamentally flawed (easily defeated by the first loophole or golden tactic found).
Max
As in what you said, make it make mistakes.
Why on Earth would you want it to make mistakes?Seriously, the only time I hear gamers complaining that a game is "too hard" is either when cheats stack things in the AI's favor so badly they're glaringly obvious, or when the player is simply too incompetent to ever come close to mastering the game.
Give me better AI, not AI that's both stupid AND deliberately designed to fuck up. Or is it that you're trying to simulate the lowest common denominator among gamers?
Max
Then some whiners came along and said 'The AI is only beating me because it's cheating!'
Only an idiot would play poker against someone who had a few extra decks stuffed up their sleeves. The challenge is meaningless when the opponent cheats.
Max
It's nice to see that the patent office actually rejects some claims from time to time. Although I'm willing to bet more than a few Apple fanboys will cry "foul!" because their beloved company didn't get it's way this time.
Max
copying the ebook is a crime and students can be punished for it.
So is downloading music and movies, and yet 70% of all Americans who have an internet connection do it at least occasionally. Like the laws governing file sharing, this one will largely be ignored.
Max
I don't know what color the sky is in your world, but SuSE is by far and away the easiest and most user-friendly of the distros. YAST really sets SuSE apart by being the best installation and configuration tool around. I've tinkered with just about every distro under the sun and I always come back to SuSE at the end of the day.
Max
As with all of these moves, the point isn't to improve the security or safety of the average citizen, but to make it easier for the government to track every aspect of that citizens life. Criminals will find ways to circumvent the new devices, making them useless for any other purpose.
The more you know about a person, the easier it is to control them. And I think it's painfully apparent at this point that our government has a vested, intense interest in making sure it can control each and every one of us in order to preserve the status quo (people in power stay in power, the rest of us remain proles forever).
Tinfoil-hat stuff, I know, but with every one of these stories I wonder more and more often if the paranoids don't have it right.
Max
and you don't have to step on anyone else's group to do so.
Not only that, you *can't* step on anyone else's group because you lack the power to do so. It's probably the defining positive quality of the sytem.
Max
the population of the internet needs to come together to ensure that the internet supports their ideals.
The internet is not, has never been, and (the gods willing) will never be a democracy. The vast majority of folks who use various internet services don't get to decide shit except for what the latest 'cool' trend is (e.g., blogging); they have no input or say whatsoever in any of the technical decisions that go into how the internet will function.
This is a *good* thing. Most of these people aren't even remotely competent enough to contribute to the discussion, much less have a say in the decision. They haven't earned the right to sit at the table, something which (fortunately) isn't granted to them the moment they turn 18.
Even divorcing the discussion from the technical details the internet *still* isn't a democracy. Since no one-world government exists there isn't one set of laws to bring us all into the darkness and bind us; hell, even national laws within national borders are a joke on the internet, primarily just a springboard for random police/FBI showmanship. Only a fool could say with a straight face that any national law passed in the last twenty years has served to substantially modify behavior on the internet.
As it stands the internet is a mix of a millions of little dictatorships, some larger than others, connected together through a bizarre form of organized non-government, the infrastructure of the whole thing being built upon the arcane deliberations of a very specific set of wizards. And so far as I can see it seems to be doing just fine - much better, in fact, than many government-dominated endeavors.
Max
The CAN-SPAM law specfically restricts these sorts of lawsuits to ISPs, but I'm not certain of the details.
It actually gives a special status to the lawsuit brought by an ISP against a spammer, allowing the suit to be covered under CAN-SPAM rather than local law.
It's unfortunately to have your right to sue removed
The U.S. government can't selectively remove your right to sue while allowing others to retain that right. It's unconstitutional. And in any event it isn't what CAN-SPAM does.
Max
The idea is that women tend to work fewer hours/take longer leaves than men, and this leads to the difference.
Single women take less leave than single men do. Single men get sick more often, tend to contract serious illnesses more commonly than women do, and die younger. If you have a choice between a single woman and a single man and you're looking for dependability then a woman is the better bet.
Where the situation reverses is when your employee is a married woman with children. That's because even in this 'enlightened' age husbands expect the wives to take time off of work to care for children; very few couples have an 'equal time' policy. The husband simply assumes that whatever he's doing is more important and that it's the wife's obligation to take time from work when the kids need it.
If you compare single woman with children and single men with children (the latter being a pretty small sample size) then you're back to men taking more time from work than women. In this case the men not only have to care for their children without aid, but since they themselves get sick more often they end up taking more leave.
The only other consistent difference between the two sexes is leave due to pregnancy, but in this case it should be pretty bloody apparent to just about anyone with a few neurons to rub together why a woman just might take more pregnancy-related leave than a man.
Max
My point was I find it amusing someone is comparing Yahoo Mail and their accompanying services to GMail. Do you often compare the intellect of your six year old with that of your one year old? Let's see how complete GMail's calendar and related offerings are in a few more years.
You missed the point. The user doesn't give a shit if GMail hasn't had time to catch up to Yahoo services. All the user (rightly) cares about is which one is more useful and user-friendly. And that makes a comparison entirely appropriate, just like any other product review. Gmail doesn't 'get a break' just because it hasn't been on the block as long as Yahoo.
Max
Levy = Fee administered by a private organization
Except that as I understand it this so-called levy is backed by government force. Stores aren't allowed to sell imported American CD-Rs and bypass the levy imposed by the 'private organization'.
That's a tax, plain and simple.
Max
authorized this levy (not tax)
This is splitting hairs. A levy is a tax by any other name. Calling it something different doesn't actually make it a different thing. In the end a government body is demanding money from you under penalty of law if certain specific conditions are met - and that's a tax, no matter what they decide to call it. In fact, it appears to be a kind of property tax, in that if you choose to purchase the property you have to pay the tax (although not annually, for obvious reasons).
Max
Especially under Steve Jobs, they pull little stunts like this here and there that really bring in the herd.
You mean like the current 2% of the computer-using population that actually owns a Mac? Yeah, way to "bring in the herd", Apple....
Max
...the entire appended conversation devolves to:
- this is a good thing because competition is a good thing. Having a single search engine dominate the market is just as bad as having a single browser dominate the market; and
- anything which competes with my Lord and God Google is evil and must be struck down! Death to the infidel Yahoo!
Yep, looks like someone's been poking the Google fanboy hive with a stick again....
Max
Anyway, why don't you re-try this argument when GMail has been around as long as Yahoo mail. I'd say for "playing catch-up" to Yahoo mail, Google has done a fucking brilliant job.
We're supposed to give 'em a pat on the back and use Google search over Yahoo search because Google is "brilliant" at playing the catch-up game, and just might some day offer the same suite of services that Yahoo does? What the fuck are you smoking?
Max
Economic profit is not the only motivator for exploration and technological development, nor is it the only justification for a permanent offworld presence.
I disagree. While I approve of using my tax dollars to fund the exploration of the solar system via probe, I don't approve of the enormous outlay required to do that exploration with human beings. There isn't any justification (in my mind) for doing with humans what can be done much, much cheaper with robots; and even if there were some small scientific gain to be had when using humans I don't think it justifies the cost.
The rest of the solar system offers us space, raw materials, and energy in near unlimited quantities.
That would be an economic incentive for the exploitation of space, would it not?
Also, the Earth is a source of single point failure... one ecological or climatological collapse or a comet or astroid collision, and the human race could cease to exist, and those little green pictures of dead presidents will be of little use, value, or comfort.
Your money would be better spent keeping the Earth from getting hit by some nasty comet or asteroid than in trying to move millions off-world.
And hell, if you think big enough, terraforming is always a possibility.
Where, exactly? You can't terraform Venus; it's tidelocked. And Mars is too small. If you want to terraform Mars you're going to have to rebuild all the atmosphere it's lost to space, probably by throwing thousands of comets at it from the Oort Cloud - and that means you'd have to remove all the current colonists for the few centuries it'd take to complete the task. While it might someday become practical, it would be more efficient to colonize Mars without terraforming it.
When I look to the future, I want "Star Trek"
When I look to the future I want "Battlestar Galactica". Hot cylon babes like Boomer, hoowah!
Max
The problem is you need a huge initial investment, and you get no return. None. It doesn't matter if you can mine mineral X on Mars, it'll always be cheaper to get it from Earth (or the asteroid belt). You invest, and you never get back what you invested. The colony may become self-sufficient (will become self-sufficient, if it's large enough) but there isn't anything on Mars that can't be gotten elsewhere cheaper.
But current technology won't advance if we don't start trying to do these things.
There's no evidence whatsoever that technology will fail to progress simply because we aren't colonizing other worlds in the Sol Sytem.
Max
If by "valid" you mean "I can make whatever mouth noises I want", then you're right. However, if by "valid" you mean "accurately reflects reality", then no, your opinion isn't necessarily as valid... its validity will depend on its accuracy, not on the identity of the speaker.
Okay, here's why my opinion is more valid than the doomsayers.
- Every single prediction of woe and grief put out by the population control folks has been WRONG. During the '60's they said that carrying capacity would be reached in the early eighties, and things would shortly collapse thereafter; during the '70's they said it would happen in the '90's, and during the '80's they were sure we were all going to be fucked by the year 2000. Stretch back to the year 1900 and they were sure that the Earth couldn't handle more than four billion people, even with strict governmental control over the consumption of resources.
Yet here we are in 2005 and not a single prediction they've made has come to pass. They've been wrong about the population numbers, about carrying capacity, about technology, and about the grand collapse of all things human EVERY SINGLE TIME. It's amusing that they don't even bother to acknowledge their persistent failures at prediction; they just revise their numbers and start all over again, conveniently ignoring the fact that they've never managed to get any of it right.
- every person whose said that the scaremongers were wrong has been RIGHT.
Simple logic tells me that I'm far more likely to be on the money if I think the population control fanatics are full of shit than if I buy into their crap this time around.
Max
Well, let's look at what has actually happened in the last 40 years, shall we?
Currently the doubling rate for knowledge in most scientific fields is between 18 and 24 months. Do you know what that means? It means, for example, that in the next two years we'll learn as much about computer science as we have in all of previous human history combined. Two years after that we'll do it again - effectively quadrupling our knowledge in four years. And so on. More interesting, the rate of doubling is continually declining.
This is true of most scientific or technical fields. It's a real phenomenon that's getting more and more attention as time goes by because it doesn't seem to be stumbling into any roadblocks (i.e., predicted plateaus).
Ultimately what it means is that only a fool would predict the next 40 years based on the last 40 years. The doubling period was considerably longer 40 years ago than it is today, and will be much shorter 40 years in the future; technological improvement *is not a linear progression but an asymptotic one*.
Making predictions 20, 30 or 40 years in the future based on what's right in front of our noses today is about as accurate as the psychic predictions laid out in the Weekly World News.
Max
People who have studied these things say we're in trouble
The lunatic fringe has been screaming about how some critical system in the ecology or human society is going to collapse since the '60's - and every single time they've been just plain wrong. So they revise their estimates, hoping that people don't notice that they've got egg all over their face, and go back to predicting Armageddon just like any other mad little preacher. Hell, they've been ominously pontificating about ugly mass death due to overpopulation since Malthus, and not only has it not happened but they can't even get the simple things right - like basic math, or the decline in growth rates.
we're all seriously screwed.
All of the end-of-the-world types predict this. It's not exactly new or original. They deserve about as much credence as the sign-carrying idiot who stands on the street corner shouting "The end times are nigh!"
Max
Technology, bound to the earth
This clause makes no sense. Technology is not limited by the fact that we don't have populations in space. Technological advancement won't halt simply because we haven't bothered to put a station down on the surface of Mars.
then we run out of resources.
Again, you're assuming that technological development will never find a solution to dwindling resources. For all we know in the next 20 or 30 years nanotechnology will be used to turn iron and copper atoms into gold, palladium, and irridium. Tailored bacteria may be used to 'mine' landfills (in fact, some of that is being tested right now). The scientists working on practical fusion may finally get around to making a working, profitable reactor.
We don't *know* what's coming, but if the past is any indication it isn't just incremental changes to what we have right at this moment. The doubling of scientific knowledge in most fields is between 18 and 24 months, and the period is decreasing; no one, including you or me, can make even the vaguest predictions as to what will be possible in 20 years.
All chicken-little scenarios rely on a massive technological freeze that defies all common sense, not to mention every scrap of historical data since the Industrial Revolution. We can confidently say that technology will continue to improve, and that the period of doubling will continue to decline, for the foreseeable future; and that what we can imagine in the next 20 or 30 or 40 years will be dwarfed by what is actually accomplished.
Max