Idea's been around for a while. The main issue is that it takes some major bucks to get a project like this off the ground so it'll likely remain among the list of intriguing ideas nobody's been able to finance like intercontinental bridges, beanstalks, arcologies, and such.
[quote]Wikipedia says the plan for SpaceShipThree will be point-to-point sub-orbital flights rather than orbital as previously planned. But obviously that's contingent on their continuing success.
I'm truly amazed that they're this far along, I've previously written this stuff off as fantasy but it really is happening. There aren't hovercars but we're almost living in the future.[/quote]
What's also nice is this approach seems more realistic, each stage of the process intended to generate a positive cashflow, the profits being rolled into the next stage. Too many of these projects try to do everything at once and never even get off the ground. So to the naysayers who go waa waa, this thing's only sub-orbital, just wait another generation or three.
Games are certainly getting easier if you define it as "I can beat it."
Back in the early console days, I only ever beat maybe one in ten of the games, "beating" meaning that I got to the end credits. PC games were a different story because you could save the game state. With sheer endurance, you could make it to the end.
Older games didn't have much going for them but the play mechanics themselves and they could be fiendishly difficult and completely unforgiving. "Twitch gaming" is not a recent development.
So yeah, through sheer endurance, you can beat most games out these days. The question is whether you can maintain enough interest to bother.
The thing I've noticed as I've gotten older is that it takes a greater effort and more originality to pique my interest. I have no tolerance for annoying play mechanics, derivative designs, and rehashes of games I've already played.
I've been a fan of RTS games for a long time but nothing kills my interest in a game more than seeing something five or ten times shinier than the last RTS I played with AI and pathfinding every bit as awful as the last one.
You know you're getting screwed. They know they're screwing you. The people who would be in a position to provide oversight knows screwing is taking place. But nobody does a goddamn thing to stop it! It's just taken to be a natural part of the order of the world like death and taxes.
Education is this beautiful thing that's been corrupted into nothing more than a giant fucking con. And it never ends. Just more fresh meat cycled through the grifter's paradise.
The gag about using a team of horses to pull the Delorean up to speed. Doc has his little speedometer to check the speed. Yeah, it was a nice visual but completely nonsensical. The only way you're getting a horse up to 88 mph is if you're hauling it in a trailer. The writers are portraying Doc as an idiot for even trying something like this without realizing it's stupid right from the start.
I like the story from WWII before D-Day. The Allies had wooden and canvas tanks setup to confuse the German reconnaissance flights. The Germans showed that they'd seen through it by dropping a bomb in the center of the formation. There was no explosion. Curious soldiers investigated and saw that it was made out of wood, too!
Which is deliciously ironic... apparently the seekers of transparency, themselves, need not be transparent. Nice.
Meanwhile, Assange's paranoid need to root out this defector is clearly preventing wikileaks from actually doing the job they exist to do, as evidenced by that very transcript.
If you're putting together an army to fight for freedom and liberty, you can't run it like a democracy. There's a reason why decisive leadership is important in times of crisis. Interesting bit of history, many pirate crews operated under a form of limited democracy. They'd elect captains. Once in battle, the man's orders were obeyed as if from God. After the battle, they could decide if they had faith in him.
An operation like Wikileaks has to present a cohesive, united front. They can have all the internal debates they want but they can't appear to be bickering and disunited in public. Having poor message discipline, not clearly declaring goals and working to accomplish them, all of this results in chaos and sabotages the mission.
So this guy may well be a prick but the question is whether he's getting the job done. I've seen wonderful people who can't lead and I've seen people who are such assholes nobody will follow them. I've seen leaders who can be friendly and get things done and I've seen ones who can motivate while being hard-asses. There's no one way to do things and we'll see how this story plays out.
Quite frankly we're not going to know until we find some Martian life, and that's going to take a good deal of time. We're decades away from being able to gather direct evidence, unless we get very lucky.
First we'd need to figure out where to look for them in the first place. Just speculating here but if there were subterranean pockets of liquid water and the methane is bubbling up through porous rock into the atmosphere, getting down there to find proof would be very, very difficult. But if it's lichen clinging to rocks and we just weren't looking in the right spot, that would be easier to find.
Will be a bigger den of pedo porn than AOL of the old days! Sheesh. I predict half the users will be feds posing as children and the rest catholic priests and republicans.
What happens when we find out that the moon isn't made of green cheese but filled with popcorn?! The only reason why we aren't hearing the impending popping of doom is because there's no air in space! And they did it! They went and microwaved the moon! But just you wait, the giant fluffy kernels of doom shall come raining down on us! RAINING DOWN!!!
The biggest problem I see off hand is explaining why the aliens do not subvert our own computer networks which are much more important now then when the story was written but it would be easy enough to make a point that such subversion was insufficient in itself without military action. The aliens would at least have considered it.
The bigger problem is that the alien strategy didn't make a lick of sense. If they were truly alien, unknowable alien, then we could accept that. But their psychology was so human they may as well have been human. So then you get back to the question of what the hell they thought their strategy was going to be.
As an example of a historic screwup, Japan vs. the US. The Japanese believed in their racial superiority over the decadent, honorless West. They also believed that they had a right and duty to conquer the majority of the Pacific and institute a benevolent dictatorship over the other races. When it was pointed out that they lacked the industrial might to go toe to toe with the US, leadership scoffed and engaged in magical thinking. Americans are weak, they flee a fight. A strong Japanese fighting man could kill a hundred of them. Anyone who dissented from that view was considered a defeatist and would suffer the consequences. The self-reinforcing nature of the Japanese BS groupthink made an arrogant move like attacking Pearl Harbor inevitable. Why negotiate with the US, why avoid conflict when we know we can win? Except whoops, miscalculation.
So yes, really dumb mistakes can happen. And when one side starts a war and loses it, of course there was a miscalculation. Hardly anyone starts a fight he knows he can't win. So yes, it's plausible for the traveler herd to come across the stars and do something completely stupid like starting a war. But the dynamics just weren't drawn out properly. The mistakes made by the herd weren't properly explained in the context of the story. Why attack first instead of negotiate? Or why not establish a threat display, drop some rocks in empty areas and show that they could land on cities next? Why not come with the foot in the first place? Why arrive at Earth, attack the space station, drop some smaller rocks, fly back out to pick up the rock, fly back in to drop it, land some troops in Kansas, flitter about doing some other things... Again, a disjointed and split-brained strategy could make sense if there were political turmoil within the herd but what was outlined was insufficient to explain what we saw.
I totally want them to make a Footfall movie and really use a Project Orion craft. Usually they just have a technobabble solution for how the humans beat the aliens, but in that case you didn't need to use technobabble. The humans really did have a big stick, they were going to kick your ass, and there wasn't anything you were going to be doing about it.
Footfall had some good ideas but was a fairly dreadful book, not up to their usual standard. I did like the idea of Earth fighting back with an orion drive ship. The only problem is that it required a lot of colossal stupidity on the part of the aliens to ever let it become a human-winnable fight. There had to be the right combination of immaturity, lack of forethought, idiotic assumption that aliens will react to your gestures with the exact same psychology, etc. If you're going to war, dropping rocks is a good idea, of course. But I still don't understand where they came up with the paratroop assault idea from. And you would think with the technology for interstellar flight that they'd also have perfected combat robotics. I mean we're already seeing some real starts right now.
It just strikes me as ludicrous that their best idea for combat is to put a gun in the snout of a herdmember and send him out to fight the humans. My thinking is that with any plausible alien invasion, you'd be looking at automated combat machines all the way through. Big ones for hitting big targets, little ones for getting into nooks and crannies to hunt humans down. Any invader who wants to get a close look at the hairless apes would stay back at base and let the machines bring the specimens to him.
Granted, the goal of the book was to tell a plausible alien invasion story, a War of the Worlds updated a bit. But it just lacked imagination.
When I used to work in the wireless Internet world, I had an associate who had much the same problem with idiots shooting at his antennas. After he had been forced to change antennas on several occasions, I told to him that the simple way to fix the problem was to mount a bullseye somewhere else on his towers and give these lunatics something different to aim at. The last time I talked to him his antennas were bullet hole free but he did have to replace a few of the targets due to them taking some serious damage. Come on, Google, put some creative thought into solving these problems..
Have the targets shoot back. If the hunters want to man up about their sport, fucking man up.
I can't believe that filesharing is given such a high priority by governments in Europe. The entertainment industry must have a VERY strong lobbying organization to pull that off. It's a pity that rape victims and other sufferers from really bad crimes are not as well organized and don't have such deep pockets as the entertainment industry.
Look, I don't think you're giving them enough credit. They're also being very serious about wikileaks. It's not just the entertainment industry getting their balls fondled here.
Incidentally, I love how the wikileaks thing just highlights the problem with the way the powerful handle their business. The problem isn't that bad things happened, the problem is that you found out about it! So reform efforts won't be directed towards preventing bad things from happening, just making sure we're more diligent about keeping them under wraps. "If not for them, you wouldn't even know about the military slaughtering innocent civilians! And would you even be so upset about fecal bacteria in your meat if nobody told you?" Stupid smoke detector keeps going off, pull the batteries. By the way, anyone else having trouble breathing? I wonder if there might somehow be a connection.
In another five years someone will buy the naming rights to Duke and release a flash browser game as "Duke Nukem Forever" as a gag. "See, it finally came out."
What is a more pressing problem is the weakness of the buttons. Those suckers lose their spring and then you're left with a duff controller. A better button probably would cost fifty cents a button.
The better comparison is Scott Ritter. Weapons inspector, major Bush embarrassment. He was picked up in 2001 for suspicions of arranging a meeting for underage sex with an undercover cop posing as a young girl. He wasn't charged which to me seems kind of odd since there aren't too many good explanations for showing up at a sting like that. Whatever. The documents were sealed and not public record. They were leaked anonymously when he started becoming a pain in the Bushie behind.
Of course, the dumb shit went and got caught again in 2009. Just goes to show that being an expert in a given field does not mean you won't make stupid mistakes in some other area. People do fall for the trick of discrediting the messenger if they don't like the message. Your least favorite person at work tells you there's a mistake in the budget numbers, you may as well see if she's right.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would the people implementing security theatre want to subject themselves to it?
They know it's just show. Not to mention the whole being above the law thing.
It has long since ceased being kabuki theater and has passed into bukkake theater.
http://www.seasteading.org/
Idea's been around for a while. The main issue is that it takes some major bucks to get a project like this off the ground so it'll likely remain among the list of intriguing ideas nobody's been able to finance like intercontinental bridges, beanstalks, arcologies, and such.
[quote]Wikipedia says the plan for SpaceShipThree will be point-to-point sub-orbital flights rather than orbital as previously planned. But obviously that's contingent on their continuing success.
I'm truly amazed that they're this far along, I've previously written this stuff off as fantasy but it really is happening. There aren't hovercars but we're almost living in the future.[/quote]
What's also nice is this approach seems more realistic, each stage of the process intended to generate a positive cashflow, the profits being rolled into the next stage. Too many of these projects try to do everything at once and never even get off the ground. So to the naysayers who go waa waa, this thing's only sub-orbital, just wait another generation or three.
Games are certainly getting easier if you define it as "I can beat it."
Back in the early console days, I only ever beat maybe one in ten of the games, "beating" meaning that I got to the end credits. PC games were a different story because you could save the game state. With sheer endurance, you could make it to the end.
Older games didn't have much going for them but the play mechanics themselves and they could be fiendishly difficult and completely unforgiving. "Twitch gaming" is not a recent development.
So yeah, through sheer endurance, you can beat most games out these days. The question is whether you can maintain enough interest to bother.
The thing I've noticed as I've gotten older is that it takes a greater effort and more originality to pique my interest. I have no tolerance for annoying play mechanics, derivative designs, and rehashes of games I've already played.
I've been a fan of RTS games for a long time but nothing kills my interest in a game more than seeing something five or ten times shinier than the last RTS I played with AI and pathfinding every bit as awful as the last one.
You know you're getting screwed. They know they're screwing you. The people who would be in a position to provide oversight knows screwing is taking place. But nobody does a goddamn thing to stop it! It's just taken to be a natural part of the order of the world like death and taxes.
Education is this beautiful thing that's been corrupted into nothing more than a giant fucking con. And it never ends. Just more fresh meat cycled through the grifter's paradise.
To glow red and pulse up and down, for when you're making little cylons with your favorite hoomanz.
The gag about using a team of horses to pull the Delorean up to speed. Doc has his little speedometer to check the speed. Yeah, it was a nice visual but completely nonsensical. The only way you're getting a horse up to 88 mph is if you're hauling it in a trailer. The writers are portraying Doc as an idiot for even trying something like this without realizing it's stupid right from the start.
Next they'll be complaining about the amount of lead in the jobs we're shipping over there.
4chan can use their powers for good?
Um... I just don't know how to process that information...
4chan strikes me a bit more like the classic greek gods, capricious, capable of granting blessings and curses on a whim.
What is a canola? Canola is a brand name awarded to a Canadian company for their genetically modified rape seed.
"Rape seed" sounds like japanese porn.
I like the story from WWII before D-Day. The Allies had wooden and canvas tanks setup to confuse the German reconnaissance flights. The Germans showed that they'd seen through it by dropping a bomb in the center of the formation. There was no explosion. Curious soldiers investigated and saw that it was made out of wood, too!
Which is deliciously ironic... apparently the seekers of transparency, themselves, need not be transparent. Nice.
Meanwhile, Assange's paranoid need to root out this defector is clearly preventing wikileaks from actually doing the job they exist to do, as evidenced by that very transcript.
If you're putting together an army to fight for freedom and liberty, you can't run it like a democracy. There's a reason why decisive leadership is important in times of crisis. Interesting bit of history, many pirate crews operated under a form of limited democracy. They'd elect captains. Once in battle, the man's orders were obeyed as if from God. After the battle, they could decide if they had faith in him.
An operation like Wikileaks has to present a cohesive, united front. They can have all the internal debates they want but they can't appear to be bickering and disunited in public. Having poor message discipline, not clearly declaring goals and working to accomplish them, all of this results in chaos and sabotages the mission.
So this guy may well be a prick but the question is whether he's getting the job done. I've seen wonderful people who can't lead and I've seen people who are such assholes nobody will follow them. I've seen leaders who can be friendly and get things done and I've seen ones who can motivate while being hard-asses. There's no one way to do things and we'll see how this story plays out.
Quite frankly we're not going to know until we find some Martian life, and that's going to take a good deal of time. We're decades away from being able to gather direct evidence, unless we get very lucky.
First we'd need to figure out where to look for them in the first place. Just speculating here but if there were subterranean pockets of liquid water and the methane is bubbling up through porous rock into the atmosphere, getting down there to find proof would be very, very difficult. But if it's lichen clinging to rocks and we just weren't looking in the right spot, that would be easier to find.
Will be a bigger den of pedo porn than AOL of the old days! Sheesh. I predict half the users will be feds posing as children and the rest catholic priests and republicans.
What happens when we find out that the moon isn't made of green cheese but filled with popcorn?! The only reason why we aren't hearing the impending popping of doom is because there's no air in space! And they did it! They went and microwaved the moon! But just you wait, the giant fluffy kernels of doom shall come raining down on us! RAINING DOWN!!!
The biggest problem I see off hand is explaining why the aliens do not subvert our own computer networks which are much more important now then when the story was written but it would be easy enough to make a point that such subversion was insufficient in itself without military action. The aliens would at least have considered it.
The bigger problem is that the alien strategy didn't make a lick of sense. If they were truly alien, unknowable alien, then we could accept that. But their psychology was so human they may as well have been human. So then you get back to the question of what the hell they thought their strategy was going to be.
As an example of a historic screwup, Japan vs. the US. The Japanese believed in their racial superiority over the decadent, honorless West. They also believed that they had a right and duty to conquer the majority of the Pacific and institute a benevolent dictatorship over the other races. When it was pointed out that they lacked the industrial might to go toe to toe with the US, leadership scoffed and engaged in magical thinking. Americans are weak, they flee a fight. A strong Japanese fighting man could kill a hundred of them. Anyone who dissented from that view was considered a defeatist and would suffer the consequences. The self-reinforcing nature of the Japanese BS groupthink made an arrogant move like attacking Pearl Harbor inevitable. Why negotiate with the US, why avoid conflict when we know we can win? Except whoops, miscalculation.
So yes, really dumb mistakes can happen. And when one side starts a war and loses it, of course there was a miscalculation. Hardly anyone starts a fight he knows he can't win. So yes, it's plausible for the traveler herd to come across the stars and do something completely stupid like starting a war. But the dynamics just weren't drawn out properly. The mistakes made by the herd weren't properly explained in the context of the story. Why attack first instead of negotiate? Or why not establish a threat display, drop some rocks in empty areas and show that they could land on cities next? Why not come with the foot in the first place? Why arrive at Earth, attack the space station, drop some smaller rocks, fly back out to pick up the rock, fly back in to drop it, land some troops in Kansas, flitter about doing some other things... Again, a disjointed and split-brained strategy could make sense if there were political turmoil within the herd but what was outlined was insufficient to explain what we saw.
I totally want them to make a Footfall movie and really use a Project Orion craft. Usually they just have a technobabble solution for how the humans beat the aliens, but in that case you didn't need to use technobabble. The humans really did have a big stick, they were going to kick your ass, and there wasn't anything you were going to be doing about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footfall [wikipedia.org]
Footfall had some good ideas but was a fairly dreadful book, not up to their usual standard. I did like the idea of Earth fighting back with an orion drive ship. The only problem is that it required a lot of colossal stupidity on the part of the aliens to ever let it become a human-winnable fight. There had to be the right combination of immaturity, lack of forethought, idiotic assumption that aliens will react to your gestures with the exact same psychology, etc. If you're going to war, dropping rocks is a good idea, of course. But I still don't understand where they came up with the paratroop assault idea from. And you would think with the technology for interstellar flight that they'd also have perfected combat robotics. I mean we're already seeing some real starts right now.
It just strikes me as ludicrous that their best idea for combat is to put a gun in the snout of a herdmember and send him out to fight the humans. My thinking is that with any plausible alien invasion, you'd be looking at automated combat machines all the way through. Big ones for hitting big targets, little ones for getting into nooks and crannies to hunt humans down. Any invader who wants to get a close look at the hairless apes would stay back at base and let the machines bring the specimens to him.
Granted, the goal of the book was to tell a plausible alien invasion story, a War of the Worlds updated a bit. But it just lacked imagination.
When I used to work in the wireless Internet world, I had an associate who had much the same problem with idiots shooting at his antennas. After he had been forced to change antennas on several occasions, I told to him that the simple way to fix the problem was to mount a bullseye somewhere else on his towers and give these lunatics something different to aim at. The last time I talked to him his antennas were bullet hole free but he did have to replace a few of the targets due to them taking some serious damage. Come on, Google, put some creative thought into solving these problems..
Have the targets shoot back. If the hunters want to man up about their sport, fucking man up.
I can't believe that filesharing is given such a high priority by governments in Europe. The entertainment industry must have a VERY strong lobbying organization to pull that off. It's a pity that rape victims and other sufferers from really bad crimes are not as well organized and don't have such deep pockets as the entertainment industry.
Look, I don't think you're giving them enough credit. They're also being very serious about wikileaks. It's not just the entertainment industry getting their balls fondled here.
Incidentally, I love how the wikileaks thing just highlights the problem with the way the powerful handle their business. The problem isn't that bad things happened, the problem is that you found out about it! So reform efforts won't be directed towards preventing bad things from happening, just making sure we're more diligent about keeping them under wraps. "If not for them, you wouldn't even know about the military slaughtering innocent civilians! And would you even be so upset about fecal bacteria in your meat if nobody told you?" Stupid smoke detector keeps going off, pull the batteries. By the way, anyone else having trouble breathing? I wonder if there might somehow be a connection.
In another five years someone will buy the naming rights to Duke and release a flash browser game as "Duke Nukem Forever" as a gag. "See, it finally came out."
But Penny will forever be a bitch and a traitor for letting Will Wheaton spook her into dumping him!
Don't blame her, blame the writers. But she'll be back. He's ruined her for dumber men.
What is a more pressing problem is the weakness of the buttons. Those suckers lose their spring and then you're left with a duff controller. A better button probably would cost fifty cents a button.
I love how this is the quote that came up at the bottom of the story.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. -- Aleister Crowley
Ain't a real lightsaber until you can take off an arm with it.
The better comparison is Scott Ritter. Weapons inspector, major Bush embarrassment. He was picked up in 2001 for suspicions of arranging a meeting for underage sex with an undercover cop posing as a young girl. He wasn't charged which to me seems kind of odd since there aren't too many good explanations for showing up at a sting like that. Whatever. The documents were sealed and not public record. They were leaked anonymously when he started becoming a pain in the Bushie behind.
Of course, the dumb shit went and got caught again in 2009. Just goes to show that being an expert in a given field does not mean you won't make stupid mistakes in some other area. People do fall for the trick of discrediting the messenger if they don't like the message. Your least favorite person at work tells you there's a mistake in the budget numbers, you may as well see if she's right.