In theory, you could use a small glass of water, accelerated to a significant fraction of the speed of light, as your propellant for an entire trip to Mars and back. In practice, there is a limit to the speed to which an ion thruster can accelerate the ions it's throwing out and so you still need quite a large amount of propellant.
And also led to the scifi observation (niven or pournelle, I forget which) that any technology that makes for a decent spaceship engine also makes for a decent weapon.
The worrisome part about cloud computing is putting your trust in someone else's hands. But keeping your backup process internal to the company is no panacea either. Bad management practice is what led to the cloud screwing up, just like bad management practice led to in-house data losses at other companies.
How many of you guys generate your own power 24x7? C'mon, you're really going to place the face of your business in the hands of people running off the wire? Wire power. Feh! That wire could be going anywhere. Real men run their own generators!
Sounds silly, right? Of course, that's only because we're used to power companies running like utilities, government-regulated monopolies allowed to exclusively service the public with a healthy, dependable profit in return for low rates and universal service. In such an environment having your own generators for anything other than emergencies is paranoia. But wow, you start deregulating things and let the businessmen go nuts and it almost seems like you'd have to.
The real question with cloud computing is whether the companies are going to operate in a fashion that brings to mind steady, sober, dependable service like a local utility, like a giant rapacious corporation uncaring of human concerns, or like a fly-by-night dotcom. My personal opinion is that I don't trust these fuckers. Current company's situation is that we have a major software product we run our business on and the publisher got gobbled up by a bigger company and that company got gobbled up by a bigger one. The big company has decided to discontinue the product and have been slowly dismantling the team that supports it. We know we're going to have to make a jump eventually but the conglomerate could pull the plug tomorrow and we'd still be in operation. If it was a cloud app, we could be dead in the water.
After reading this I realize the not-so-obvious benefit of real planes flying around patrolling and bombing the enemy... The fear factor. As stated in the summary " Al Qaeda claims it's not all that scared of drones", which makes sense, a little spec in the sky orbiting quietly does not put the fear of God, oh sorry Allah, into the enemy. Get a couple of F35s, A10s or Apaches cruising about voila, fear is back. Intimidation is back factor in warfare. Never really thought about that aspect of an all-drone airforce...
I've been under an F-15 at an air show and it sounds like God just got home, especially when the afterburners light up. I can only imagine what it's like when there's no concern about popping the eardrums of those on the ground.
That being said, operationally they keep the aircraft above 20k feet specifically to avoid small arms fire. The level required to act as a psychological weapon makes them great for target practice.
Incidentally, if they're not intimidated by having antitank missiles and precision-guided bombs falling on their heads, I doubt flying any lower will do much to wilt their spirits.
...why exactly? How is ST any different from any other sci-fi series like BSG or Firefly? It's not as if those show have any less technobabble or are any less characters-first-technology-second.
I call it "If it's enjoyable, I'll overlook it. If it's not enjoyable, I'll nitpick it out of pique." Plot hole example: in Empire Strikes Back, the Faclon's hyperdrive was broken when it tried to leave Hoth. The fight with the Star Destroyers, the TIE's, the jaunt in the asteroid belt, all was in the Hoth system. Hell, the asteroid belt might have been a planetary ring around Hoth. The point is, by the time they did the drift away maneuver and the Imperials left, they were still in the Hoth system. They then set course for Bespin. Given that the hyperdrive did not work, either Bespin is in the same system as Hoth or someone made a booboo. The Falcon ends up travelling to a new system at sublight speed which should still take a few centuries. Do we care about that oversight? Not really cuz the movie was still quite enjoyable. We don't complain when we see the stormtrooper hit his head on the door in A New Hope.
Now if we look at the recent Trek movie, it sucked great donkey cock. It simply wasn't enjoyable. So we nitpick. Badguy is upset Spock didn't save his planet and goes back in time. Rather than warning the planet hundreds of years early that the evacuation should begin, he blows up Vulcan. But now knowing Romulus is a goner, they could begin the evacuation now and thus prevent the situation from arising that Nero needs to go back in time. But even if we say that this is now fixed in the timeline and nothing can change, why was Spock sitting pretty on the ice planet instead of walking over to the outpost months ago and sending word to Starfleet that a crazy Romulan was going to blow shit up.
That script sucked from stem to stern. The actors were pleasant and might have been able to make a decent movie with a decent script. The camera man was obviously suffering from some form of palsy and should have been given a medical retirement and replaced with someone who could hold the fucking thing steady!
"But, yes, when you admit that Star Trek has as much to do with plausibly extrapolated science as The A-Team has to do with a realistic look at the lives of military veterans, life gets easier. "
That's a nice way of putting it. I always agreed that the way to tell if you're watching or reading a science fiction story is to see if you can pull out the trappings and still be able to tell the story. A movie like the Matrix is clearly scifi since it would be very difficult to tell without the technology angle. I mean you could try and do it but it would end up sucking as much as the sequels.
Something like Star Wars, on the other hand, it's heroic fantasy and you could do a bang-up job with it recasting it in a Tolkein world. The Force is magic, the Jedi are wizard-knights, the Galactic Empire is now more clearly Rome after the fall of the Republic, all the space travel is replaced with sailing around the great frontiers of the empire, the Death Star is downgraded to a city-busting weapon, Darth Vader borrows a spare set of armor from the Witch King of Angmar and swaps out his custom TIE Fighter for a fell beast, etc. Droids could become magical clockwork constructs, aliens are your various demi-human races. Chewbacca becomes a frost giant or a yeti. All of the essential themes of Star Wars work in this context because it's about the hero-quest, betrayal, redemption, and licensing fees.
Babylon 5 was good science fiction because it brought up concepts that would be hard or impossible to tackle in other genres. Yes, the basic idea of the Shadow/Vorlon conflict was accused of being LOTR with the serial numbers filed off but the resemblance I think ends up being superficial, it's the execution that makes the two stories different. Some of the storytelling in B5 was allegorical, just casting current problems in a different setting so that we could actually think clearly about the issues instead of getting worked up with our prior opinions.
The recent BSG was not just poor science fiction, it was poor storytelling. The writers were working without a plan and it showed. I've already gone a few rounds with apologists before and I know I won't convince anyone but the crap that made me stop watching BSG is the same crap that made me stop watching Heroes (and I frickin' lurved the first season of Heroes.) And the only reason I even care is that this genre is right up my alley. I don't complain about the writers ruining House even if they are because I don't care for medical dramas.
Trek died for me around the time B5 came about. What killed it is that there was no longer any drive and vision in the process, it was corporate-driven mung for the sake of making money. There was about as much joy and art put into it as you'd find in a Big Mac at the local McDonalds. So you get bland plots, reset buttons, and massive yawns. There were some good points in TNG even with all that, some people will defend DS9, nobody can defend Voyager and I think we've all agreed that Enterprise happened in Vegas and is staying there.
[quote]the Large Hadron Collider's difficulties may be due to the universe's reluctance to produce a Higgs boson[/quote]
Let's apply Occam's Razor. One of two cases must be true, either: (a) "the Large Hadron Collider's difficulties may be due to the universe's reluctance to produce a Higgs boson" or (b) building a machine like this is rather complicated and it might take a few goes before they get it right.
Of course, there could be an option (c) they really suck. I'll try that on my boss the next time I fuck something up. "No, see, it's not that I'm not any good at my job, it's that the universe is conspiring against the proper completion of the project. Have I ever mentioned Schroedinger's Cat?"
Why not just charge a monthly fee to play a stand-alone, single-player game? Simply paying a lump sum at the beginning and playing from there is soooooo lame!
Sheesh. All this means is that I'll just skip buying on launch day and wait for the collector's edition with all DLC to come down to $15 used. Brilliant move, brainiacs.
Agreed. I'm a moderate gamer and have a mac mini and a 360 under my tv. The 360 can do some video streaming from XP computers with media player 11 or Vista boxes but it's a pain in the butt. There's products like tversity that can do transcoding but it's so much more hassle than it's worth it's not even funny.
The short answer: the 360 has the hardware to be a great media center but Microsoft does not want to allow the hardware freedom for that to happen. No custom boot loader, no unsigned code, nothing. Use a purpose-built box for your media center, you will be so much happier. The 360 is only good for games and console games at that. People into games that only really exist on the PC will scoff at the consoles.
Why does the CD soundtrack to a $150 million movie cost $17.50 and the DVD goes for $14? It's because those are the price points they got the public to swallow. VHS movies back in the day used to go for $75 or some ridiculous number and only the video stores bought them -- who would have thought private individuals would want to own movies? But eventually the price points dropped and there you are.
Back in the day, Sierra games came with order forms for other Sierra games. Those crappy little DOS games were selling for $79.99. The stores typically had the prices lower but not by much. The entire time I was growing up, the price points for AAA titles for the top systems would be anywhere from $40 to $60. Usually $50 was the sweet spot. I recall Street Fighter having some of the most insane markups. I think SFII topped out at $80 for the SNES. Then you could also pay another $100 a piece for the special controllers.
The two things that strike me now are 1) games were really goddamn expensive back in the day and 2) I'm surprised that they haven't been able to jack that price harder considering inflation and all.
I agree with the article about how crazy it seems for simpler games selling for the same price as ones you know have to be ridiculously expensive to produce.
After you see the desktop it's another minute for all the system tray crap to load. And if you're stuck with corporate antivirus? May as well throw some cinderblocks in the trunk of that nice sportscar and watch it do 0 to 60 like an arthritic Ford Pinto.
Nice headline! "250-Foot Hybrid Airship To Spy Over Afghanistan In" - in what? In November? In 2010? In next ten years? In mission to provide big target in sky? In huge ball of flames? In super-secret mission that no-one knows about?
Will they replace all the swastikas with walkie-talkie's? I always maintained in the bunker with Hitler and Eva, Hitler shot first. Did that get changed, too? And is the blood still green?
But therein lies the solution. Get Monsanto to genetically modify pollen from the plant to include huge quantities of THC. Release pollen into the wild. As the THC levels in the plants rise, tell the stoners that pot may be illegal but this stuff isn't even on the radar. Inform Frito-Lay to ramp up production. Then I guess I'll just stick a few ???'s in here and declare profit!
A pity you didn't mention Kennedy in what is otherwise a perfectly respectable rant.
Kennedy has a whole list of sins but almost starting WWIII ain't among them. I'd say his attempts at ordering the assassination of world leaders was paid off with karmic interest. If only the same could have been said for Nixon and Kissinger.
I first heard of this a few years after the cold war ended. Most of it was probably fictionalized but the way it was described is that three hardened telephone lines took widely separate routes from Moscow to a command bunker maybe a hundred miles away. These were severely hardened lines and for all three to go down at once could only mean that Moscow was nuked -- or some idiot tripped over a plug, you know how it is when you say something is fool-proof. Something else claimed at the time was that the Soviet method of controlling nukes was entirely automatic. The American system relies on computers sending launch codes via hardline or radio and human beings at the weapons personally deciphering and acknowledging the codes.
There could still be a hole in the system, say launch orders were improperly sent. I guess the pentagon thought erroneous orders could be directly countermanded. But there was a sense of comfort in having humans in the loop. By contrast, the soviet system was described as being completely automatic. I don't think that sounds completely right. I can understand maybe a missile silo being setup for automatic launch on order with the human crew just being caretakers but I don't see that working for a sub. The sub would have to get the order, the crew would have to bring the sub to launch depth, punching through the ice sheet if on polar patrol, and this is all assuming the Russians even had the ULF system the Americans did where subs at patrol depth could receive low-bandwidth radio signals -- because otherwise subs were incommunicado without coming to periscope depth and extending a radio mast.
The thing that still amazes me to this day was that the soviets could have a coup without nukes flying. I thought for sure a power struggle like that would end in a fireball.
The thing that scares me the most from the Cold War is we were raised to fear the specter of a Soviet attack but our own leaders were every bit as batshit crazy as they were accusing the Soviets of. Fucking Nixon and his brinksmanship, fucking LeMay and trying to start WWIII during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and fucking Reagan as mentioned in TFA. Those fucking monsters did their level best to end modern civilization.
Yesterday the FCC takes a stand on net neutrality I agree with and today it's French officials. What happens tomorrow, Microsoft open sources Windows Se7en? Glenn Beck apologizes to Obama? Uwe Boll throws himself from the Golden Gate Bridge to atone for his crappy movies?
I think that's very important to note. His quote by itself is very self-loathing but to add that tit's unavoidable really says a lot. You want to be popular? You have to satisfy more people and in doing so you become more bloated.
That's something I'll try to work into my performance review.
Have the "I'm A Mac" commercials permeated the consciousness of Microsoft to the point that they themselves feel that no one but nerds and suits use windows? What good is a mac entrenched hipster selling windows?
1. It's usually the bigger companies that get them, not smaller ones. 2. Licensed properties are seen as licenses to print money, the fans will buy whatever slop goes on the market. 3. Consequently the push for the developer is to get something with the licensed faces out the door, no matter whether or not it's any good. 4. Fans go on to purchase these games, living down to the expectations of the publishers. 5. A dependable if not spectacular profit is made from the game. 6. Publishers greenlight another unimaginative, unenjoyable, underdeveloped, hackneyed licensed game.
There was a game based on the old Starfleet Battles tabletop game. Came out yonks ago. It was pretty much half-completed. It had a lot of ambition, you could tell it had the potential to be a good game, but it was seriously only half complete! Sure, the graphics were pretty, single ship and small fleet actions played out fine, but the entire strategic element was obviously spanked together in a weekend. They released a sequel not too long after that. Was it the game they originally planned, this time completed? No. If anything, they broke what did work and replaced the half-baked strategic mode with the distilled essence of pain and suffering, squeezed from the souls of the unborn.
Slashdot Mirror
In theory, you could use a small glass of water, accelerated to a significant fraction of the speed of light, as your propellant for an entire trip to Mars and back. In practice, there is a limit to the speed to which an ion thruster can accelerate the ions it's throwing out and so you still need quite a large amount of propellant.
And also led to the scifi observation (niven or pournelle, I forget which) that any technology that makes for a decent spaceship engine also makes for a decent weapon.
Prison rape isn't funny.
Normally I'd agree but in this guy's case, I think I might snicker a little.
The worrisome part about cloud computing is putting your trust in someone else's hands. But keeping your backup process internal to the company is no panacea either. Bad management practice is what led to the cloud screwing up, just like bad management practice led to in-house data losses at other companies.
How many of you guys generate your own power 24x7? C'mon, you're really going to place the face of your business in the hands of people running off the wire? Wire power. Feh! That wire could be going anywhere. Real men run their own generators!
Sounds silly, right? Of course, that's only because we're used to power companies running like utilities, government-regulated monopolies allowed to exclusively service the public with a healthy, dependable profit in return for low rates and universal service. In such an environment having your own generators for anything other than emergencies is paranoia. But wow, you start deregulating things and let the businessmen go nuts and it almost seems like you'd have to.
The real question with cloud computing is whether the companies are going to operate in a fashion that brings to mind steady, sober, dependable service like a local utility, like a giant rapacious corporation uncaring of human concerns, or like a fly-by-night dotcom. My personal opinion is that I don't trust these fuckers. Current company's situation is that we have a major software product we run our business on and the publisher got gobbled up by a bigger company and that company got gobbled up by a bigger one. The big company has decided to discontinue the product and have been slowly dismantling the team that supports it. We know we're going to have to make a jump eventually but the conglomerate could pull the plug tomorrow and we'd still be in operation. If it was a cloud app, we could be dead in the water.
After reading this I realize the not-so-obvious benefit of real planes flying around patrolling and bombing the enemy... The fear factor. As stated in the summary " Al Qaeda claims it's not all that scared of drones", which makes sense, a little spec in the sky orbiting quietly does not put the fear of God, oh sorry Allah, into the enemy. Get a couple of F35s, A10s or Apaches cruising about voila, fear is back. Intimidation is back factor in warfare. Never really thought about that aspect of an all-drone airforce...
I've been under an F-15 at an air show and it sounds like God just got home, especially when the afterburners light up. I can only imagine what it's like when there's no concern about popping the eardrums of those on the ground.
That being said, operationally they keep the aircraft above 20k feet specifically to avoid small arms fire. The level required to act as a psychological weapon makes them great for target practice.
Incidentally, if they're not intimidated by having antitank missiles and precision-guided bombs falling on their heads, I doubt flying any lower will do much to wilt their spirits.
You may be right but there comes a time when even the best controls slip.
...why exactly? How is ST any different from any other sci-fi series like BSG or Firefly? It's not as if those show have any less technobabble or are any less characters-first-technology-second.
I call it "If it's enjoyable, I'll overlook it. If it's not enjoyable, I'll nitpick it out of pique." Plot hole example: in Empire Strikes Back, the Faclon's hyperdrive was broken when it tried to leave Hoth. The fight with the Star Destroyers, the TIE's, the jaunt in the asteroid belt, all was in the Hoth system. Hell, the asteroid belt might have been a planetary ring around Hoth. The point is, by the time they did the drift away maneuver and the Imperials left, they were still in the Hoth system. They then set course for Bespin. Given that the hyperdrive did not work, either Bespin is in the same system as Hoth or someone made a booboo. The Falcon ends up travelling to a new system at sublight speed which should still take a few centuries. Do we care about that oversight? Not really cuz the movie was still quite enjoyable. We don't complain when we see the stormtrooper hit his head on the door in A New Hope.
Now if we look at the recent Trek movie, it sucked great donkey cock. It simply wasn't enjoyable. So we nitpick. Badguy is upset Spock didn't save his planet and goes back in time. Rather than warning the planet hundreds of years early that the evacuation should begin, he blows up Vulcan. But now knowing Romulus is a goner, they could begin the evacuation now and thus prevent the situation from arising that Nero needs to go back in time. But even if we say that this is now fixed in the timeline and nothing can change, why was Spock sitting pretty on the ice planet instead of walking over to the outpost months ago and sending word to Starfleet that a crazy Romulan was going to blow shit up.
That script sucked from stem to stern. The actors were pleasant and might have been able to make a decent movie with a decent script. The camera man was obviously suffering from some form of palsy and should have been given a medical retirement and replaced with someone who could hold the fucking thing steady!
"But, yes, when you admit that Star Trek has as much to do with plausibly extrapolated science as The A-Team has to do with a realistic look at the lives of military veterans, life gets easier. "
That's a nice way of putting it. I always agreed that the way to tell if you're watching or reading a science fiction story is to see if you can pull out the trappings and still be able to tell the story. A movie like the Matrix is clearly scifi since it would be very difficult to tell without the technology angle. I mean you could try and do it but it would end up sucking as much as the sequels.
Something like Star Wars, on the other hand, it's heroic fantasy and you could do a bang-up job with it recasting it in a Tolkein world. The Force is magic, the Jedi are wizard-knights, the Galactic Empire is now more clearly Rome after the fall of the Republic, all the space travel is replaced with sailing around the great frontiers of the empire, the Death Star is downgraded to a city-busting weapon, Darth Vader borrows a spare set of armor from the Witch King of Angmar and swaps out his custom TIE Fighter for a fell beast, etc. Droids could become magical clockwork constructs, aliens are your various demi-human races. Chewbacca becomes a frost giant or a yeti. All of the essential themes of Star Wars work in this context because it's about the hero-quest, betrayal, redemption, and licensing fees.
Babylon 5 was good science fiction because it brought up concepts that would be hard or impossible to tackle in other genres. Yes, the basic idea of the Shadow/Vorlon conflict was accused of being LOTR with the serial numbers filed off but the resemblance I think ends up being superficial, it's the execution that makes the two stories different. Some of the storytelling in B5 was allegorical, just casting current problems in a different setting so that we could actually think clearly about the issues instead of getting worked up with our prior opinions.
The recent BSG was not just poor science fiction, it was poor storytelling. The writers were working without a plan and it showed. I've already gone a few rounds with apologists before and I know I won't convince anyone but the crap that made me stop watching BSG is the same crap that made me stop watching Heroes (and I frickin' lurved the first season of Heroes.) And the only reason I even care is that this genre is right up my alley. I don't complain about the writers ruining House even if they are because I don't care for medical dramas.
Trek died for me around the time B5 came about. What killed it is that there was no longer any drive and vision in the process, it was corporate-driven mung for the sake of making money. There was about as much joy and art put into it as you'd find in a Big Mac at the local McDonalds. So you get bland plots, reset buttons, and massive yawns. There were some good points in TNG even with all that, some people will defend DS9, nobody can defend Voyager and I think we've all agreed that Enterprise happened in Vegas and is staying there.
[quote]the Large Hadron Collider's difficulties may be due to the universe's reluctance to produce a Higgs boson[/quote]
Let's apply Occam's Razor. One of two cases must be true, either:
(a) "the Large Hadron Collider's difficulties may be due to the universe's reluctance to produce a Higgs boson"
or
(b) building a machine like this is rather complicated and it might take a few goes before they get it right.
Of course, there could be an option (c) they really suck. I'll try that on my boss the next time I fuck something up. "No, see, it's not that I'm not any good at my job, it's that the universe is conspiring against the proper completion of the project. Have I ever mentioned Schroedinger's Cat?"
I'm thinking noodly appendages are involved.
Why not just charge a monthly fee to play a stand-alone, single-player game? Simply paying a lump sum at the beginning and playing from there is soooooo lame!
Sheesh. All this means is that I'll just skip buying on launch day and wait for the collector's edition with all DLC to come down to $15 used. Brilliant move, brainiacs.
Agreed. I'm a moderate gamer and have a mac mini and a 360 under my tv. The 360 can do some video streaming from XP computers with media player 11 or Vista boxes but it's a pain in the butt. There's products like tversity that can do transcoding but it's so much more hassle than it's worth it's not even funny.
The short answer: the 360 has the hardware to be a great media center but Microsoft does not want to allow the hardware freedom for that to happen. No custom boot loader, no unsigned code, nothing. Use a purpose-built box for your media center, you will be so much happier. The 360 is only good for games and console games at that. People into games that only really exist on the PC will scoff at the consoles.
Why does the CD soundtrack to a $150 million movie cost $17.50 and the DVD goes for $14? It's because those are the price points they got the public to swallow. VHS movies back in the day used to go for $75 or some ridiculous number and only the video stores bought them -- who would have thought private individuals would want to own movies? But eventually the price points dropped and there you are.
Back in the day, Sierra games came with order forms for other Sierra games. Those crappy little DOS games were selling for $79.99. The stores typically had the prices lower but not by much. The entire time I was growing up, the price points for AAA titles for the top systems would be anywhere from $40 to $60. Usually $50 was the sweet spot. I recall Street Fighter having some of the most insane markups. I think SFII topped out at $80 for the SNES. Then you could also pay another $100 a piece for the special controllers.
The two things that strike me now are 1) games were really goddamn expensive back in the day and 2) I'm surprised that they haven't been able to jack that price harder considering inflation and all.
I agree with the article about how crazy it seems for simpler games selling for the same price as ones you know have to be ridiculously expensive to produce.
It's not the first time Ballmer has attacked Windows Mobile, having publicly stated that version 6.5 was "not the full release we wanted"."
But you released it anyway, didn't you, Steve? You say you're sorry but you don't mean it.
After you see the desktop it's another minute for all the system tray crap to load. And if you're stuck with corporate antivirus? May as well throw some cinderblocks in the trunk of that nice sportscar and watch it do 0 to 60 like an arthritic Ford Pinto.
But I thought AIDS was sent by God as a scourge of teh gheys. So God must hate the 68.8% it doesn't work for, then.
Nice headline! "250-Foot Hybrid Airship To Spy Over Afghanistan In" - in what? In November? In 2010? In next ten years? In mission to provide big target in sky? In huge ball of flames? In super-secret mission that no-one knows about?
Hey, blimpin' ain't easy.
Will they replace all the swastikas with walkie-talkie's? I always maintained in the bunker with Hitler and Eva, Hitler shot first. Did that get changed, too? And is the blood still green?
There must be some reason why the South of Japan is not one mass of Kudzu and cogongrass.
There's a reason but I don't think you're gonna like it.
But therein lies the solution. Get Monsanto to genetically modify pollen from the plant to include huge quantities of THC. Release pollen into the wild. As the THC levels in the plants rise, tell the stoners that pot may be illegal but this stuff isn't even on the radar. Inform Frito-Lay to ramp up production. Then I guess I'll just stick a few ???'s in here and declare profit!
A pity you didn't mention Kennedy in what is otherwise a perfectly respectable rant.
Kennedy has a whole list of sins but almost starting WWIII ain't among them. I'd say his attempts at ordering the assassination of world leaders was paid off with karmic interest. If only the same could have been said for Nixon and Kissinger.
I first heard of this a few years after the cold war ended. Most of it was probably fictionalized but the way it was described is that three hardened telephone lines took widely separate routes from Moscow to a command bunker maybe a hundred miles away. These were severely hardened lines and for all three to go down at once could only mean that Moscow was nuked -- or some idiot tripped over a plug, you know how it is when you say something is fool-proof. Something else claimed at the time was that the Soviet method of controlling nukes was entirely automatic. The American system relies on computers sending launch codes via hardline or radio and human beings at the weapons personally deciphering and acknowledging the codes.
There could still be a hole in the system, say launch orders were improperly sent. I guess the pentagon thought erroneous orders could be directly countermanded. But there was a sense of comfort in having humans in the loop. By contrast, the soviet system was described as being completely automatic. I don't think that sounds completely right. I can understand maybe a missile silo being setup for automatic launch on order with the human crew just being caretakers but I don't see that working for a sub. The sub would have to get the order, the crew would have to bring the sub to launch depth, punching through the ice sheet if on polar patrol, and this is all assuming the Russians even had the ULF system the Americans did where subs at patrol depth could receive low-bandwidth radio signals -- because otherwise subs were incommunicado without coming to periscope depth and extending a radio mast.
The thing that still amazes me to this day was that the soviets could have a coup without nukes flying. I thought for sure a power struggle like that would end in a fireball.
The thing that scares me the most from the Cold War is we were raised to fear the specter of a Soviet attack but our own leaders were every bit as batshit crazy as they were accusing the Soviets of. Fucking Nixon and his brinksmanship, fucking LeMay and trying to start WWIII during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and fucking Reagan as mentioned in TFA. Those fucking monsters did their level best to end modern civilization.
Yesterday the FCC takes a stand on net neutrality I agree with and today it's French officials. What happens tomorrow, Microsoft open sources Windows Se7en? Glenn Beck apologizes to Obama? Uwe Boll throws himself from the Golden Gate Bridge to atone for his crappy movies?
I think that's very important to note. His quote by itself is very self-loathing but to add that tit's unavoidable really says a lot. You want to be popular? You have to satisfy more people and in doing so you become more bloated.
That's something I'll try to work into my performance review.
Have the "I'm A Mac" commercials permeated the consciousness of Microsoft to the point that they themselves feel that no one but nerds and suits use windows? What good is a mac entrenched hipster selling windows?
He'll be doing it ironically.
1. It's usually the bigger companies that get them, not smaller ones.
2. Licensed properties are seen as licenses to print money, the fans will buy whatever slop goes on the market.
3. Consequently the push for the developer is to get something with the licensed faces out the door, no matter whether or not it's any good.
4. Fans go on to purchase these games, living down to the expectations of the publishers.
5. A dependable if not spectacular profit is made from the game.
6. Publishers greenlight another unimaginative, unenjoyable, underdeveloped, hackneyed licensed game.
There was a game based on the old Starfleet Battles tabletop game. Came out yonks ago. It was pretty much half-completed. It had a lot of ambition, you could tell it had the potential to be a good game, but it was seriously only half complete! Sure, the graphics were pretty, single ship and small fleet actions played out fine, but the entire strategic element was obviously spanked together in a weekend. They released a sequel not too long after that. Was it the game they originally planned, this time completed? No. If anything, they broke what did work and replaced the half-baked strategic mode with the distilled essence of pain and suffering, squeezed from the souls of the unborn.
Terribly disappointed.