The variation among fraternal twins is a bit larger [...]
The variation among fraternal twins should be identical to that of ordinary siblings. Genetically, fraternal twins are ordinary siblings, born at the same time.
The Middle East only has power as long as petroleum is a major source of energy, the day it is not they are financially doomed for 50-100 years.
Even worse than that, I think. The Middle East is mostly desert; it has little besides oil going for it. When oil is no longer the lifeblood of the world, all those countries in the Middle East are going to be screwed, permanently. I mean, look at the situation now: they've been receiving mind-boggling amounts of money for many decades, and they're all still 3rd-world nations run largely by tinpot dictators. The most advanced country in the Middle East is the one that has no oil at all, Israel.
Look at one small example, Saudi Arabia. It spends a gigantic amount of money every year on purifying salt water at a massive plant near Riyadh. This supplies something like 75% of the entire country's freshwater needs. Without oil money to run it, they wouldn't be able to support a population nearly as large as they do now. Of course, if they managed to turn themselves into a high-technology mecca (har, har) or find some other source of revenue, they could survive... but that's not going to happen.
I'm not really familiar with how things work in Seattle, but that was a pretty flimsy piece. We get lines like the following, supportive of Microsoft:
The 28-year-old company is transforming from a fast-growing, young organization into a big, mature enterprise more aware of its responsibilities and the effects of its legendary aggressive -- even illegal -- behavior. The company is trying to adopt a more paternal role. It's using its vast resources to help the ailing PC industry in new ways.
Then we hear about the viewpoint of the anonymous, amorphous "critics":
Then there's the widely held notion among critics that Microsoft is essentially unchanged after its antitrust settlement with the federal government.
... except 2 paragraphs down, the writer flat out says that Microsoft is changing, downplaying the validity of customers' complaints.
Customers are less likely to praise the company's software than to gripe about its prices, aggressive sales tactics and stranglehold on their machines -- even as it changes its practices as a result of the antitrust case.
Anyway, there's a lot more stuff like that. It's not a blatant flack piece, but they've got Gates and Ballmer with smooth marketing-speak from the interview, and no one to respond and call them out on it. If the Seattle Times wants to present a more reasoned article, they should actually go out and get more objective viewpoints than a single "technology analyst" with the "Giga Information Group".
Re:Important note about the Japanese DVD set...
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Giant Mecha News
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· Score: 1
I found Eva's dubs to be some of the worst I've heard (though I avoid dubs as much as I can)
Word. A couple of times, while I was getting screen captures off the DVDs in Xine, I would fast forward a track without setting the audio to Japanese first... and I found myself in for a nasty surprise when I stopped clicking for long enough. I specifically remember doing it during that virus episode, focused on Ritsuko, and hearing this unbelievably godawful snippet of whatever voice actress plays her.
Besides that... if you leave the End of Evangelion DVD sitting in the player long enough, the sound track on the opening menu progresses from Bach's Cantata 137 to this voiceover by Shinji's English voice actor (Spike Spencer, no?), which is a nasty surprise if you're not expecting it.
I'm glad they include Robotech. That in my opinion is one of the best early mech shows.
I always see people say this, and my experience just doesn't jive, so here goes...
Are we talking about the same Robotech? The very first Macross series, that starts off with the short history of Macross island, and then we get the invading fleet, and that dude who is accidentally locked in a mecha?
My brother picked up a small box set of 3 DVDs, with ~6 episodes each, called "The Macross Legacy", or something to that effect. DVD quality is awful, there are no options, it's dub only. The dub is unbelievably awful. The animation quality is pretty poor, but I know it's old, and I could deal with it if the voices were passable, and they aren't. (Incidentally, I feel the exact same way about the Mobile Suit Gundam the Cartoon Network was playing in Adult Swim a while back - just can't deal with the dub.)
Is that the great, exalted Robotech? What's the deal?
Oh, he doesn't care. That must be why he inserted this provision into the PATRIOT act, giving him the ability to get bookstore records without authorization from a judge. Because he doesn't care.
Now, you can bet your ass that when they arrested the buffalo 6 they tried to find out what books they checked out from their local library or bought from a local book store. Why? The answer is of course, DUH.
I like how your tortured, laughable explanation for this law -- which I'll demolish immediately below -- is so obvious it merits a "DUH".
If they bought a bunch of books on chemistry that had information that could be used to make bombs, then they had better start busting their asses to figure ot if any had been made and where they went.
Really? So, the police/FBI, having gathered enough evidence to arrest those 6 men, interrogate them, search their apartments, work, etc., will then go to their neighborhood bookstore to find out what they've been buying? Bullshit. How about they look at the fucking books in their fucking houses. The only reason to have unhindered access to bookstore records is to use them to form opinions on the suspect, or clarify to the ones they already have.
Meanwhile, you and I have not had our civil liberties infringed one single bit.
Good god, what do you think "infringe" means? "Look up my bookstore records, FBI guy! It's all fine by me!" "Put a tail on me 24/7! Take plenty of pictures!" "Feel free to bug my house, feds! Be sure to get a camera in the bedroom!" "I'm jeramybsmith, and I don't want any civil liberties!"
Ponder this, you have expose a terror cell and don't capture one of them. You find out at the local book store they were buying books on flying small aircraft. Ah ha! You have a lead!
As I said above, this is FINE! Because if you've fucking arrested them, then you got a warrant, and you can go to the bookstore with that. Not that you'd need to, since you collected all their fucking books when you tossed their place.
However, I feel government should be able to access the records that are there if there is an imperative national security interest.
If national security is at stake, then I imagine they won't have much trouble getting a warrant from a judge.
Lastly: get a clue and toss in some fucking line breaks.
But, a highly elliptical orbit will have an object moving SIGNIFICANTLY faster at it's perigee (closest point to sun) [...]
Your post is so informative, I feel it necessary to nitpick. Perigee and apogee deal with ellipses around the Earth; for the Sun, the corresponding words are perihelion and aphelion.
A) if it from a terrestrial craft, harmless because 50k mph is way past escape velocity, and so would be moving away from earth, never to return.
I don't think so. Nothing says debris from a collision in LEO has to fly outward, away from Earth. Stuff going out at vectors closer to tangent with the orbit might enter eccentric elliptical orbits. I haven't run any calculations, so I don't know about the 50,000 mph, but you could get some pretty fast shit with an apogee coinciding with Earth orbit, making collision with stuff in that circular orbit possible.
Anyone who's taken physics more recently than I have, feel free to tell me where I'm wrong.
I mean come on, would you like to be hit in the face by a tiny frozen lump of astronaut poo travelling at 17 000 mph?
Hehehe... I don't know about the shuttles, but in one of the recent Columbia-related news articles, I read that the ISS just vents their urine out into space.
That'll make for a splatter infinitely worse than bird crap on some spaceship's windshield one day...
Speaking of Battlestar Galactica (and going completely OT)...
The pilot episode (or whatever) was on SciFi a couple days ago, where the Cylons break the peace pact and force the fleet to leave and start their search for Earth.
(Note: I am technically boycotting all non-Farscape material on SciFi (not that any of it's watchable anyway, lol), but I felt it permissible to watch for a couple minutes in between channel-surfing.)
The science -- actually, the entire plot -- of the pilot was laughable. First we had awful shots of a human fighter being pursed by a Cylon squadron through space... It still pisses me off that barely any shows in space have presented a realistic portrayal of space travel. You accelerate, people! You don't get up to a maximum velocity, and stay there with thrusters burning! And let's not forget the gratuitous fiery explosion when the patrol fighter gets hit.
Then we had some shots of a Cylon squadron shooting up this peacenik hippie chick, her son, and their cute dog. So some buildings in this shite residential district are getting hit, and then we get Adama in the ship hearing that "the planet's in flames". Oh, okay, 1 Cylon fighter squadron destroyed the entire planet in 2 minutes. Just clearing that up!
And I thought Battlestar Galactica was supposed to have been this super-cool show, barring the 1970s-era special effects. Curses.
You make a solid block of something really dense that is as shatter-proof as we can make, like bulletproof glass or something [...]
Seriously, why make something so hard? I think something gelatinous or organic would work better. Say, a radius = 10 meter sphere of chewed-up chewing gum. Something with enough mass so that no debris particle could penetrate all the way through it, and something amorphous so that impacts wouldn't cause more debris to break off.
Plus, something like you describe would cost a shitload to ship up to LEO. Something with less mass, but with enough stuff there to stop particles, might be better.
[...] all an enemy needed to do to take said network out was launch a handful of rockets to the same orbit to explosively release simple payloads of (many) ball bearings.
True. But the function of Star Wars would have been to lessen or eliminate the impact of a surprise Soviet ICBM strike on the US by taking out as many missiles as possible while they were in transit. IOW, the satellites would have been meant to prevent a single attack (presumably after which, our own ICBM strike would have been carried out and annihilated the USSR's nuclear attack capability). The Soviets wouldn't have simply been able to clandestinely launch a debris rocket, let the laser sats get destroyed, and launch a strike of their own. It would take time for the satellites to get hit. This entire process could be long and drawn out, with the US discovering the Soviet debris rocket, engaging in diplomatic maneuvering, threatening nuclear war, launching more sats, blah blah blah...
Your plan would work, inasmuch as carefully-placed space debris could take out everything in a certain orbit. But:
If the satellites were equipped with maneuvering thrusters, they could use them to accelerate perpendicular to their orbit and the Earth's radius (e.g. tangent to the meridian directly downward from them), so that their orbit would be modified so its great circle would only cross the debris' orbit twice per orbit.
Now that I think of it, that idea sucks, and if the satellites had maneuvering thrusters, they could use them instead to boost themselves into a higher orbit.
Also, would the soviets have known which satellites were the Star Wars ones? We could have kept their launch secret, and interspersed them with communications sats, so the Soviets wouldn't have been able to distinguish between commercial and military sats.
Anyway, if the US had launched laser sats, the Soviets would have eventually launched them too. If anyone has played Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, we then would have had a situation like the SMAC endgame, where a number of factions have laser satellites in orbit, each with a certain chance to stop an attack directed against it.
Wow, I really need to load up Civ 3 and toss some nukes around.
You can set up LAN games. You can play on Battle.net with thousands of other players.
sigh... Have you ever played on Battle.net? If you had, you'd know that Blizzard spends as little money as it can maintaining the Bnet servers. They regard it as a money sink, a big fat expenditure swallowing up their spreadsheets. Bnet is free, and has a lot of fellow players to join up with, but is otherwise poor-quality. Most of my Bnet experience was with Diablo II, and quite often (a couple times a month) one literally could not access Bnet -- and when one could play, lag was often unbearable.
There is not really 1 single good, legal use for bnetd, and you fucking know it.
As I've outline above, Blizzard's free multiplayer service, Battle.net, is not ideal, or even desirable. Being able to access servers of one's own choice, run by persons other than Blizzard, is certainly a good use for bnetd. In the legal arena, I certainly have the right to do whatever the fuck I want to with software I have purchased. If I want to pop it in the microwave, use it to send TCP/IP packets to some server, or mod it to hell and gone, those are all legal, and more to the point, entirely moral and ethical actions.
Ah, I was hoping you'd say that. Couldn't think of any SF on tv that you might be talking about; but SF in general, certainly.
I see good peripheral results from miniseries in terms of people reading the original books, but in this case the good has already been done. We had Lynch's film in the 80s, and the miniseries 2 years ago, both based on the original Dune, but now Scifi is making something whose source material is not very film/miniseries-worthy. I think any Scifi fanboys who go to read the Dune sequels after seeing this miniseries will not find them very enjoyable; I imagine the prequels would be more to their taste.
[...] the dim expectations of a youth culture made to believe that the likes of "Farscape" or "Babylon 5" constitute the best SF has to offer, simply because they're a tick above the Star Trek/Star Wars "Happy Meal" fodder [...]
Huh? Knocking Farscape AND B5? Perhaps you would care to offer me any recent SF television series as good as those 2? I can think of shows as good (Buffy, X-Files), but I am genuinely interested in something an order of magnitude better.
I can't believe you're using those 2 shows to represent the poor interests of a "youth culture". Seems like you should be trashing... I don't know, reality-show dreck, UPN dreck, WB dreck...
[...] the prequels, each one of them, are written better than Dune itself.
Wow. You're raising up the Dune prequels above the original Dune? The 1965 Nebula award winner and 1966 Hugo award winner? One of the most famous science fiction novels ever written?
The prequels are fast paced, well written, clear, fascinating page turners that expertly illuminate the events leading up to those protrayed in the original Dune.
This is some great advertising copy. "expertly illuminate"? The prequels are entertaining reads (I thought House Harkonnen was somewhat worse than the others), well in line with co-author Kevin J. Anderson's previous work -- his Star Wars novels, for example -- but to compare them to the original Dune is ludicrous.
Some people enjoy the prequels; others don't care for them. That's all cool. But to call the prequels better than the original... I have to question your taste in SF, and literature in general.
Before I read another "is there no shame" post, herbert is getting what he deserves: paid. This guy has a trmendous imagination and the motivation to organize it.
Frank Herbert is long dead. It's his son, Brian Herbert, who is cashing out on his father's legacy. I would certainly not call any of those rewards "deserved".
Let the Dune franchise flourish.
No. This isn't a case of an author doing what he wants to with his creation, it's of an estate inheritor doing what he wants with the deceased estate owner's property.
? I'm sorry, but I'm utter confused by your comment. When was Children of Dune a horror film?
Grandparent was referring to Children of Dune when he said "literature". What he meant by "horror film" was the total dreck SciFi is putting on the air now, in a sick strategy to corner the... uh, exactly-like-TNT/TBS/USA-channel market.
Re:Just another one that didn't do it for EA
on
Sim-Dud?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
EA, sadly, has a history of trying to make MMOG and failing. UO is the exception, but then again, EA bought Origin after UO was in production.
The problem EA is suffering from is one of its own making, and it is far more pervasive and damaging than merely MMOGs.
Reading the linked NYTimes article gives a good idea of their mindset and "strategy" for the future. They mention the idea of the Sims Online and EA.com as a "third arm" to join the first and second arms of their PC and console game empires, respectively. Presumably, they think they can build a gigantic new revenue stream by tapping the great, mythical "Joe Average" and convincing him to pay to play casual, very non-hardcore games like solitaire, chess, and now the Sims Online, over the Internet.
For those/.-ers unfamiliar with EA.com, it appears for all intents and purposes to be a relic of the dot-com age: a couple years ago, EA decided to turn their website into something very close to Yahoo Games, instead of merely serving information, support, etc., about their PC/console games. It turned by stomach at the time to see what EA was turning itself into, when it had just killed Origin, the greatest or certainly one of the greatest PC game developers in history, which EA had bought out some time before. Ultima Online fans will remember that when EA destroyed Origin, it simultaneously axed hopes for a UO 2, instead deciding to wring the game for cash by releasing low-quality expansion packs.
EA has been a behemoth for quite some time, but the debilitating effects on the developers it holds have never been more evident. Take Westwood, formerly an innovating, renowned game developer. Since its purchase by EA, Westwood has totally lost all vestiges of its former greatness, and churned out almost nothing but (largely uninteresting) rehashes and reworkings of its Command & Conquer series. Witness Earth & Beyond, its MMORPG, set in space -- I believe they briefly discuss its lack of success in one of the linked articles. I beta-tested the game for a brief period, before I grew disgusted and wiped it from my hard drive. Suffice it to say EaB was not the space MMOG so many SF fans like myself had been waiting for; you can easily see just what was so disappointing about it by Googling for reviews, or noting EaB's presence as a runner up for Gamespot's Most Disappointing PC game of the year. (Gamespot's yearly awards were posted in a/. story a couple weeks back.)
I think the pattern is evident: EA these days, and since years back, has been all about its yearly releases of console sport games -- Madden 2000, Madden 2001, Madden 2002, ad nauseam -- and relatively mindless action games. EA is focused on nothing but profit margin and expansion, and while their strategy has certainly succeeded up to this point (they are by far the largest game publisher in the world), they are certainly not a company that puts out interesting and innovative games. Their wretched strategy to hook the average person with lowest-common-denominator online time-sinks is degrading, and I'm glad to see that their massive investment into Sims Online, and into expanding this degrading and disgusting revenue source, are turning into a complete failure.
EA is not a source of good things in the gaming industry. I can't call their total dedication to the bottom line at the expense of quality "evil", but I know it will never produce the superb kind of games that people like Sid Meier, Warren Spector, Chris Taylor, etc., continue to create at small development companies.
"fast"? Um, to construct, or in use? Because a space elevator will take a long, long time to construct, and payload on an elevator actually would take several days to come up or down.
"cheap"? ROFL. It would be by far the largest and most expensive engineering project ever undertaken. The biggest project, period. Trillions and trillions of dollars over many years.
"can be created with technology avaible [sic] in the next two to there [sic] years"? We don't even know if it's possible with current materials science. At the very least, years of research and engineering in nanotech would be required before we knew if we could build it.
"will allow a huge bom in space exploration and be a giant bonus to the worldwide economy"? Yes.
"and all for less than the price of developing a new fighter-jet fleet or space shuttle system ($16B each)"? No, as I said above, it would cost TRILLIONS AND TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS.
I like the idea of a space elevator, BTW, and think we should build one as soon as we can... which won't be for another few years.
Hell, they made TANG, can't they think of something new in the 30 years since they designed the Shuttle?
Sure; NASA has funded craploads of advanced projects over the years... it's just that they've cancelled literally all of the programs to design new space vehicles. Most recently, the X-33 and X-34 were canned. Many (most?) of the projects saw promise, but NASA killed them at the first sign of straying outside budget. Yeah, admirable goal, whatever, except it's been 25 FUCKING YEARS since the shuttle and there is NOTHING NEW in the pipeline.
Wow... You know, I have to thank you. Someone above mentioned a license plate donation scheme, someone else a check-box on tax forms, and I was just blindly nodding my head.
Now I've just remembered how NASA is itself responsible for much (most?) of the trouble the U.S. space program finds itself in. Sadly, more money isn't going to fix that.
It's just that I fucking care about space... I'd donate my own money in a heartbeat. I just wish there was someone more competent to take that money and do something productive with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at one small example, Saudi Arabia. It spends a gigantic amount of money every year on purifying salt water at a massive plant near Riyadh. This supplies something like 75% of the entire country's freshwater needs. Without oil money to run it, they wouldn't be able to support a population nearly as large as they do now. Of course, if they managed to turn themselves into a high-technology mecca (har, har) or find some other source of revenue, they could survive... but that's not going to happen.
Besides that... if you leave the End of Evangelion DVD sitting in the player long enough, the sound track on the opening menu progresses from Bach's Cantata 137 to this voiceover by Shinji's English voice actor (Spike Spencer, no?), which is a nasty surprise if you're not expecting it.
No English for me. Barring the superb Bebop dub.
Are we talking about the same Robotech? The very first Macross series, that starts off with the short history of Macross island, and then we get the invading fleet, and that dude who is accidentally locked in a mecha?
My brother picked up a small box set of 3 DVDs, with ~6 episodes each, called "The Macross Legacy", or something to that effect. DVD quality is awful, there are no options, it's dub only. The dub is unbelievably awful. The animation quality is pretty poor, but I know it's old, and I could deal with it if the voices were passable, and they aren't. (Incidentally, I feel the exact same way about the Mobile Suit Gundam the Cartoon Network was playing in Adult Swim a while back - just can't deal with the dub.)
Is that the great, exalted Robotech? What's the deal?
Lastly: get a clue and toss in some fucking line breaks.
The Catcher in the Rye.
Jesus Christ. She's a girl, so it's fiancée.
Anyone who's taken physics more recently than I have, feel free to tell me where I'm wrong.
That'll make for a splatter infinitely worse than bird crap on some spaceship's windshield one day...
The pilot episode (or whatever) was on SciFi a couple days ago, where the Cylons break the peace pact and force the fleet to leave and start their search for Earth.
(Note: I am technically boycotting all non-Farscape material on SciFi (not that any of it's watchable anyway, lol), but I felt it permissible to watch for a couple minutes in between channel-surfing.)
The science -- actually, the entire plot -- of the pilot was laughable. First we had awful shots of a human fighter being pursed by a Cylon squadron through space... It still pisses me off that barely any shows in space have presented a realistic portrayal of space travel. You accelerate, people! You don't get up to a maximum velocity, and stay there with thrusters burning! And let's not forget the gratuitous fiery explosion when the patrol fighter gets hit.
Then we had some shots of a Cylon squadron shooting up this peacenik hippie chick, her son, and their cute dog. So some buildings in this shite residential district are getting hit, and then we get Adama in the ship hearing that "the planet's in flames". Oh, okay, 1 Cylon fighter squadron destroyed the entire planet in 2 minutes. Just clearing that up!
And I thought Battlestar Galactica was supposed to have been this super-cool show, barring the 1970s-era special effects. Curses.
Send up the gum!
Your plan would work, inasmuch as carefully-placed space debris could take out everything in a certain orbit. But:
- If the satellites were equipped with maneuvering thrusters, they could use them to accelerate perpendicular to their orbit and the Earth's radius (e.g. tangent to the meridian directly downward from them), so that their orbit would be modified so its great circle would only cross the debris' orbit twice per orbit.
- Now that I think of it, that idea sucks, and if the satellites had maneuvering thrusters, they could use them instead to boost themselves into a higher orbit.
Also, would the soviets have known which satellites were the Star Wars ones? We could have kept their launch secret, and interspersed them with communications sats, so the Soviets wouldn't have been able to distinguish between commercial and military sats.Anyway, if the US had launched laser sats, the Soviets would have eventually launched them too. If anyone has played Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, we then would have had a situation like the SMAC endgame, where a number of factions have laser satellites in orbit, each with a certain chance to stop an attack directed against it.
Wow, I really need to load up Civ 3 and toss some nukes around.
I see good peripheral results from miniseries in terms of people reading the original books, but in this case the good has already been done. We had Lynch's film in the 80s, and the miniseries 2 years ago, both based on the original Dune, but now Scifi is making something whose source material is not very film/miniseries-worthy. I think any Scifi fanboys who go to read the Dune sequels after seeing this miniseries will not find them very enjoyable; I imagine the prequels would be more to their taste.
I can't believe you're using those 2 shows to represent the poor interests of a "youth culture". Seems like you should be trashing... I don't know, reality-show dreck, UPN dreck, WB dreck...
Some people enjoy the prequels; others don't care for them. That's all cool. But to call the prequels better than the original... I have to question your taste in SF, and literature in general.
Reading the linked NYTimes article gives a good idea of their mindset and "strategy" for the future. They mention the idea of the Sims Online and EA.com as a "third arm" to join the first and second arms of their PC and console game empires, respectively. Presumably, they think they can build a gigantic new revenue stream by tapping the great, mythical "Joe Average" and convincing him to pay to play casual, very non-hardcore games like solitaire, chess, and now the Sims Online, over the Internet.
For those /.-ers unfamiliar with EA.com, it appears for all intents and purposes to be a relic of the dot-com age: a couple years ago, EA decided to turn their website into something very close to Yahoo Games, instead of merely serving information, support, etc., about their PC/console games. It turned by stomach at the time to see what EA was turning itself into, when it had just killed Origin, the greatest or certainly one of the greatest PC game developers in history, which EA had bought out some time before. Ultima Online fans will remember that when EA destroyed Origin, it simultaneously axed hopes for a UO 2, instead deciding to wring the game for cash by releasing low-quality expansion packs.
EA has been a behemoth for quite some time, but the debilitating effects on the developers it holds have never been more evident. Take Westwood, formerly an innovating, renowned game developer. Since its purchase by EA, Westwood has totally lost all vestiges of its former greatness, and churned out almost nothing but (largely uninteresting) rehashes and reworkings of its Command & Conquer series. Witness Earth & Beyond, its MMORPG, set in space -- I believe they briefly discuss its lack of success in one of the linked articles. I beta-tested the game for a brief period, before I grew disgusted and wiped it from my hard drive. Suffice it to say EaB was not the space MMOG so many SF fans like myself had been waiting for; you can easily see just what was so disappointing about it by Googling for reviews, or noting EaB's presence as a runner up for Gamespot's Most Disappointing PC game of the year. (Gamespot's yearly awards were posted in a /. story a couple weeks back.)
I think the pattern is evident: EA these days, and since years back, has been all about its yearly releases of console sport games -- Madden 2000, Madden 2001, Madden 2002, ad nauseam -- and relatively mindless action games. EA is focused on nothing but profit margin and expansion, and while their strategy has certainly succeeded up to this point (they are by far the largest game publisher in the world), they are certainly not a company that puts out interesting and innovative games. Their wretched strategy to hook the average person with lowest-common-denominator online time-sinks is degrading, and I'm glad to see that their massive investment into Sims Online, and into expanding this degrading and disgusting revenue source, are turning into a complete failure.
EA is not a source of good things in the gaming industry. I can't call their total dedication to the bottom line at the expense of quality "evil", but I know it will never produce the superb kind of games that people like Sid Meier, Warren Spector, Chris Taylor, etc., continue to create at small development companies.
Alright, let's begin:
- "fast"? Um, to construct, or in use? Because a space elevator will take a long, long time to construct, and payload on an elevator actually would take several days to come up or down.
- "cheap"? ROFL. It would be by far the largest and most expensive engineering project ever undertaken. The biggest project, period. Trillions and trillions of dollars over many years.
- "can be created with technology avaible [sic] in the next two to there [sic] years"? We don't even know if it's possible with current materials science. At the very least, years of research and engineering in nanotech would be required before we knew if we could build it.
- "will allow a huge bom in space exploration and be a giant bonus to the worldwide economy"? Yes.
- "and all for less than the price of developing a new fighter-jet fleet or space shuttle system ($16B each)"? No, as I said above, it would cost TRILLIONS AND TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS.
I like the idea of a space elevator, BTW, and think we should build one as soon as we can... which won't be for another few years.Now I've just remembered how NASA is itself responsible for much (most?) of the trouble the U.S. space program finds itself in. Sadly, more money isn't going to fix that.
It's just that I fucking care about space... I'd donate my own money in a heartbeat. I just wish there was someone more competent to take that money and do something productive with it.