Speaking for myself, as a New Zealander, when I see African-looking people as the carefully-selected diverse-skin-tone group for a posed ad -- as opposed to Pacific Island or Asian, which are the faces we really see here -- it automatically makes me think "American". It's roughly the same effect as having people wearing cowboy hats and speaking in a twang.
So what you're saying is they should have photoshopped in sheep. Noted for future reference.
You don't consider all of the technological advances that stemmed from Apollo to be of real use? What about the scientific knowledge that was gained from study of the moon rocks we brought back?
It's like going to college for the booze and babes and neglecting an education. I'm not knocking booze and babes but you have to keep the bigger picture in mind. There's so much more we could have been doing all this time. Think of what advances could have been made if we followed up Apollo with a real exploration program instead of dicking around in LEO with the shuttle for decades on end?
I expect that you are underestimating the costs involved traveling through Earth's gravity well. I've heard that if a rock of solid gold were orbiting Earth, it would not be economically viable to de-orbit it. Unless we discover something out there that is fantastically valuable, "industry" will not be the motivating factor for space travel.
What's the worth of the only viable biosphere we know of? We're poisoning the planet with our civilization.
This gets right back to what I'm talking about, not adequately capturing the costs. Hey, I've got a stand of trees on my land. It helps retain the soil, provides habitat for rare animals, and keeps the local ecology sound. Cutting down the trees will negatively impact the watershed. Well, that's nice and all but I've got kids who need to eat. I'm cutting down the trees and farming that land. And that's exactly what's going to happen unless someone, say the local government, determines there's an economic benefit to keeping those trees there and will pay me the cash value of the opportunity cost of not farming the land. This is taking place on certain Caribbean islands right now. (not remembering the specific ones, I think it was mentioned in Guns, Germs, and Steel.)
So, we currently think it's not worth the effort to go up into space to get the big chunk of gold. Right now we think it's cheaper to do massive put strip-mining and use cyanide leeching to get at the gold. There's a huge environmental impact from the gold mining but the companies involved don't bear the burden of that cost so why should they give a flying fuck about it? But if we actually charged them for it, oh boy! That might spur the research it would take to make getting that orbiting gold asteroid profitable.
This gets right back to the classic libertarian oversight. "Hey, this is my land. I can do whatever I want on it. You ain't gonna tell me what to do!" Well, so long as what you do doesn't impact anyone, fine! Want to build a house? Fine. Want to hunt animals, keep it as a preserve? Fine! But hold on there, what's that you're doing, dumping chemicals? Sorry, buddy, you're hurting the local water table. That shit you're dumping doesn't respect property lines. We're going to have to tell you what you can and can't do when what you're doing has the potential of harming your neighbors. You give up your right to do whatever the hell you want on your land and in exchange you are protected from your neighbor doing whatever the hell he wants on his and endangering you. Unfortunately, we're liking the idea of socializing the risks of business while privatizing the profits.
If we really want to do anything with space, we need to start doing things with economic significance. The moon trip should have been about pioneering the way towards moon habitats, moon industry. In that case it would have been money well-spent. All we really did was plant a flag and thumb our noses at the Soviets. Entertaining but of little real use. Sure, there was some spin-off technology but we threw it all away.
Planting a flag on Mars would end up being a similar waste of time, not if we weren't going to follow it up with anything else.
If we were really serious about it, we'd look into moving heavy industry offworld. Prospect our nearby apollo objects, see about mining them. Put manufacturing in Earth orbit. The only thing that comes down to Earth would be finished products in nice, simple, recyclable dropshells.
We might want to look into solar power sats while we're at it.
If nothing else, at least space exploration and living offers us an engineering challenge of figuring out how to live minimally with minimal resources. Our problem in this day and age is that resources are too cheap and there's little incentive to save. If gas were a nickel a gallon, the only selling point for fuel efficiency would be not having to stop for gas as often. Gas costs more than that, of course, but it still doesn't cost enough for us to take conservation and fuel efficiency seriously. And we don't. It's just like the buffet. If you go to one that charges by the pound, you're careful about what you take. If you go to one that doesn't charge by the pound, you take as much as you want and are casually wasteful about what you leave on the plate. Simple human nature.
That might work for music but how is it going to work for software or movies that cost tens of millions (or more) to produce? I suppose movies could still make money from the theaters but what happens to the game industry?
Either a financier fronts them the money, they get a bank loan, or they work off of pre-orders. Joss Wheadon says he's looking for financing for a new show, fans pony up the money into an escrow. If he gets enough down, the series goes into production, knowing that there's a fixed number of guaranteed sales from the get-go and more could follow if the series is good.
As far as games go, companies might have to scale back a bit. Apogee and id made killings with the shareware model. Make a game in three parts, release the first to the world, offer the second two episodes for sale. This might seem risky when talking about a game with a $20 million budget but Jesus, should it really cost that much?
Games are a slightly different animal to consider here since piracy of them is more difficult, at least in the console world. Don't you need to put in a mod chip to pirate on something like the 360?
I can involve myself in one high-level function and monitor several low-level functions no problem. If I'm cooking and it's a recipe I know, I can have something on the telly in the background. Certainly not a movie or something that requires 100% focus but I can put the Daily Show or Colbert on no problem, just glancing over during the laughs to catch the sight gag. If it's a recipe I'm unfamiliar with, I have to focus 100%, no time for distractions.
Driving is another interesting case. When I was first learning, I couldn't have the radio on or even talk with a passenger. It was a new skill and consumed 100% of my attention to a ridiculous degree. As I became more comfortable with driving, I could take a more relaxed approach. I can hold a conversation with a passenger. I'm still doing my sweeps, checking mirrors, instrument panel, paying attention to the feel of the road, listening for anything odd, but it takes less effort to do all these things. But when conditions become more interesting, it takes more effort to retain situational awareness. I'll lose track of the conversation. This is the opposite of the way most people do it, the conversation distracting from the driving.
As a mostly monotasker, I'm very skeptical of multitaskers, bordering on contemptuous. It really irks me when I'm trying to work with someone who insists on multitasking to the point where you keep having to repeat yourself because he wasn't fucking listening in the first place. "No, I heard what you said. Just repeat it so I can understand." It's a sick, pathetic, constant pattern. I tell someone x is followed by y and z. They hear x and immediately ask about c. Well, c could be related in some instances but I already told you in this instance it's x, then y, then z. But wait, why is y there? That's the sequence. And then after several more rounds the person will exclaim with a sudden revelation "Why, this is x, then y, then z!" Of course, you numpty pillock. I've only been trying to tell you that for the last ten minutes. I'm going to rip that fucking bluetooth out of your ear, yank the battery from your iphone (they are removable if you use enough force) and make you focus for a goddamn minute!
If we take a look at the range of activities proscribed by the government, making no moral judgment here, just talking about stuff they don't want you to do, you'll never get rid of it. Take drugs. Some will say that the US is too permissive a society, that we can only get rid of them if we go totalitarian. You can't get more hardcore than Singapore, China, various Islamic countries with the death penalty for drug smuggling. Guess what? You can still get drugs there. China is doing their level best to suppress the Falun Gong and they're still around. The lions didn't do much to dissuade the Christians back in the early days. Ideas couldn't be suppressed when the only way to spread them was handwritten letters and walking tours. The printing press only made suppression more difficult and the internet is the printing press x100.
I suppose, in theory, one could impose filtering at the ISP level and stop the bulk of casual P2P traffic. But just think of what people did before the internet. Oh, that's right -- mix tapes for songs, file copy parties for software. There's just no way to stop it. If we still had Prohibition, that would be enough to stop me from drinking -- there's no way I'm going to risk so much for a shot of whiskey. But my lack of patronage wouldn't hurt the speakeasies a bit.
So, what would we see if total p2p filtering was successful? (which I still say it couldn't be.) Look at Cuba. Broadband costs too much there but flash drives are cheap. There's a thriving trade in flash drives, people copying and sharing away.
Ultimately, I think that the only viable solution will be a patronage system. The content will be given away for free and a tip jar will be set out for fans to contribute to. No, the vast majority of the people who watch the show won't be paying for it but if enough do so it can remain on the air, what's the problem? I'm sure the transition from our current media model will be a painful process but we're already seeing success in some areas.
try an in-place update. the installer should inform you if it is able to do an in-place update (it should be able to).
How does that work for backing up applications? I had problems with utorrent's updates and for some reason could not do a full uninstall to be rid of it, user settings were preserved. I later found out that there were configuration files stored under my user folder in applications and libraries. Ugh, you know if Apple is going to steal an idea from Microsoft it's going to be one of the dumb ones. (Incidentally, utorrent for mac is still buggerfucked. They haven't had a stable version out for months now. I can't understand it with the windows version of the product being so spiff.)
So if I do a fresh install, I then would plug in my external time machine drive and tell it to restore the given app to the folder? Do I also have to specify the app and library files?
Picked up a mini first of the year. This will be my very first upgrade.
As I understand it, the version numbers here are pretty much on par with a Microsoft OS version number so 10.5 to 10.6 will be like going from 98 to Win2k and should be handled the same way, upgrading will make for an unstable system so I should backup everything and do a fresh install. Is this conventional wisdom still correct?
Not all technological advancement happens at a steady, conformal pace - we can send probes to other worlds, put men in space, travel across the face of the earth in hours and yet we still rely on physicians making judgement calls about diagnoses?
We can investigate the fundamentals of the universe, the big bang and quantum physics, but we are yet to fully understand every step in the process of photosynthesis - one of the most widely used processes in life on this planet.
Yeah, but being able to understand genetics enough to create an avatar and remote link a mind to it seems to imply a very strong understanding of biology. The level of ridiculousness here would be like saying "Ok, so they have cyborgs in this universe, ones capable of passing for human, the AI's are very advanced, yet they still have people manually flying aircraft and driving vehicles, not just out of a sense of nostalgia but because it can't be done...Wait a sec!"
People were complaining about Firefly's wild west aspect with office towers and spaceships on one planet and nothing but horses and six-shooters on another. Well, we do have some pretty wild differences on this planet. Just look at the range of human technology depicted in District 9, cell phones in shanty towns. I could make a good argument that a farmer who has no certain access to outside resources would prefer an ox to a tractor since an ox is easier to fuel, two oxen can make more oxen, etc. A tractor could represent a recurring expense he cannot afford. And then to really blow your mind, he could use a solar-powered laptop with GPS to plot the lay of his fields. Hey, the laptop works for a long time if you don't break it and the sun's free...
Cameron said he wanted to make more 'alien' aliens, but that conflicted with one of the plot points... a human consciousness in an alien body, falling in love with another alien. He had to go with the humanoid look in order to not completely repulse the audience.
*imagines aliens looking like James Carville.* You're right. I withdraw my objection.
Jake has unwittingly been recruited to become part of this encroachment. Since humans are unable to breathe the air on Pandora, they have created genetically-bred human-Na'vi hybrids known as Avatars. The Avatars are living, breathing bodies in the real world, controlled by a human driver through a technology that links the driver's mind to the Avatar body. On Pandora, through his Avatar body, Jake can be whole once again. Moreover, he falls in love with a young Na'vi woman, Neytiri, whose beauty is matched by her ferocity in battle.
Humanoid aliens. *sigh* I can buy it if the scenario is along the lines of ancient astronauts where the humanoid aliens are actually genetically modified from human stock or something like a Stargate where human life is seeded on other worlds by powerful entities in the past but it does sort of irk me when humanoid lifeforms evolve independently with no other explanation than someone handwaving and saying "Perhaps the bipedal form is the most superior one for earth-like worlds." Bah. I'll only buy it if the explanation is "They don't look like us. We look like them!"
I rather liked the attitude that JMS had about this kind of stuff. One time a fan asked him "How fast do starfuries go?" and his response was "They move at the speed of plot"
If the plot makes sense and the universe remains consistent about it's own rules then who cares how functional RD2D would be in our universe or how badly designed the weapons of Star Trek are?
Part of proper world-building is making it make sense. I appreciate it when an artist goes about creating a mythical fantasy beast and puts effort into figuring out the biomechanics. I laugh when I see something like a four-armed giant depicted where he's drawn with a bog-standard human chest and the second set of arms is just shoved in a foot down from the first. No, a four-armed giant would have a chest a whole lot different from ours!
If you design a fantasy spaceship, figure out what the parts are for! Yes, it's all make-believe, but you end up with a stronger design if you can justify what you're slapping on the model. I had this argument with a designer on a project, he wanted to have all the clips on the guns curving backwards instead of forwards, just to be different. I asked him if he even knew why clips curved forward in the real world. He wasn't sure. I told him it was because bullets are slightly conic and if you stack them they would naturally curve. You don't really see that in handgun cartridges but it makes a difference for the kind you put in assault rifles. He finally conceded to reason there and the weapons looked more sensible as a result.
So, as for the guy's comments in order:
R2D2: yeah, it seems like he should have a voice chip, he could speak in text through the X-Wing's computer as we saw in Empire. But everyone seems to understand him just fine, Han understands Chewie just fine, so it's not an issue. R2D2 is like the Lassie of droids.
C3P0: The reason why he walks like he's got a rod up his ass is because it's a complicated, uncomfortable costume. I promise you he wouldn't walk like that if he were CGI.
Lightsaber: They're incredible dangerous weapons to begin with and you need to be a Jedi to use them. I don't think the Jedi even need handguards.
Blasters: it's all part of the scifi schtick. Given the tech level of star wars, a conventional gun would be just as likely to give you away. Today we've got special microphones and radar that can tell the secret service exactly where a gunshot came from. In 20 years, I would not be surprised if this tech was available in helmets and onboard displays could give an augmented reality flag to where the shooter came from. A blaster would be just as subtle.
Landspeeder: Are you serious? Rednecks drive their pickups without seatbelts all the time. I don't see belts on quadrunners. It would be more appropriate to ask about the lack of five-point restraints at the crewstations on Federation starships and why the consoles all carry safety grenades that explode in combat.
Death Star: Yeah, the unshielded reactor on the first one was dumb. Lucas wanted to steal the bombing sequence from the Dam Busters and needed a plausible reason to recreate that. This necessitated a starship as big as a moon to provide the landscape, a trench to fly down to be like the first movie and some suitable target at the end that could blow the whole thing up. There was historical precedent for something like this with the Bismarck where obsolete biplanes managed to land a single torpedo at the only point on the ship where they could do damage, the rudder. Didn't sink the Bismarck but rendered it lame and set the stage for the final surface battle which sunk her.
Stormtrooper outfits: Yeah, poor visibility in the helmets is a problem. Lucas wanted these guys to all be covered up and not visibly human because it removed the human association with violence. The troopers could just as easily have been Cylons in that getup. But you'd think the helmets would have
And by my Google search estimates a carrier only has enough fuel for about 1,000 flights before exhausting its supply and needing a tanker.
I imagine during combat operations that doesn't last terribly long. And having to pull along side another vessel and safely pumping that fuel has got to provide some pretty serious tactical limitations.
Last I heard, navy doctrine called for the carrier to be able to carry two weeks worth of fuel and munitions. That's two weeks worth at a heavy war tempo. The bigger question is how much this will shorten the reactor life on the ship. As was mentioned above, the reactors only run at peak when the ship is at flank speed. Typical operation is much slower and less intensive. There's something like a decade or more between refueling and that sort of thing usually coincides with yard work that has the ship laid up for a year or more. If the reactor chews through its fuel in a few years instead of a decade, that's going to cost a pretty chunk of change. So maybe they just reserve onboard fuel generation for wartime only?
You will be excluded from winning if you commit a crime in your efforts to find me, contact my family, or physically harm me.
How about if we locate him, then wait until he's just falling asleep, sneak into his bedroom and then say in a gravely voice "Tag, you're it"? Does scaring the pee out of someone count as physical harm?
I don't understand these studies about addictive gamers who are depressed, lonely, blah blah blah. Gaming, like watching tv dramas or sports or news, or listening to the radio or ipod, is simply a way to pass the time. Why gaming would make someone depressed makes zero sense to me.
I think the bit about "coping mechanism" is key. If we look at alcoholism, there are some people who are genetically predispositioned to be hooked. Those are the people whose problem is drinking itself. You'll have others who use alcohol as the coping mechanism. Could have been alcohol, could have been some other form of escapism. Plenty of normal people can enjoy alcohol without either becoming addicted or otherwise abusing it. The problem is not alcohol but how we use it.
I don't think you'll find anyone who could say bad things about books but lots of us geeks used them as coping mechanisms when we were young. I never related well with my classmates so I just retreated into my books. While it certainly did wonders for my vocabulary, it stunted my social development. You can never avoid dealing with people while having a successful life, not unless you can pull off being a JD Salinger or make your fortune before you go all Howard Hughes.
Video games do have an addictive component to them, just like gambling. It's an addictive behavior. Some people are naturally susceptible to getting sucked in to all that. A friend of mine mailed his whole game collection home from college after he realized he lost an entire day while playing one. His roommate flunked out thanks to Diablo. Could have just as easily been thanks to booze and partying but shit, they were in the engineering program.
So, back to your original question. People who lack self-control and fall into addictive behaviors can become sad and depressed because they fucked up their lives thanks to a stupid game. I'm sure we all remember reading about World of Warcraft and Evercrack flameouts here on Slashdot, threw away marriages and careers over the damn game. Then there's people who are already sad and depressed and frustrated with the world and escape into video games so that they can find a place where they feel they are in control. There was a good article discussing this very social mechanism in South Korea. You can also see this sort of thing with the otaku in Japan who end up becoming shut-ins, I forget the name for that. It's a severe social avoidance phobia where they lock themselves in their rooms and passive Japanese parenting approaches allow the state to persist for years. In Western countries this sort of thing would sooner rather than later lead to a violent confrontation and kicking the kid out of the house.
...that irrespective of the situation, press releases are never going to say "this sucks" or "this is completely unoriginal". A few of these are genuine oversights/lack of forward thinking (e.g. the iPhone app one) but the majority of them are standard marketing hyperbole that appears everywhere ("This cleaning product will TRANSFORM YOUR LIFE!").
Life boils down to a question of whether people are talkin' the straight shit or just a line of bullshit. Bullshit pays more but the straight shit lets you look yourself in the mirror.
The funny thing, people love the bullshit. They bullshit others, they bullshit themselves. It amazes me when someone does due diligence, get told something that's true but they don't like it. This big deal I'm salivating over, it's smarter to pass it up than get all my money tied up in it? Fuck you. What, you're saying my income can only support getting the fancy house and the car, not the house, the car, and the yacht? Fuck you twice-over, cocksucker.
You get some exec with a grandiose plan, something that's really going to make his name, cement his reputation, there's no way of telling him it's just not that good of an idea. So any analyst who wants to remain employed will provide the analysis the boss wants to see, not what he needs to see. And this kind of warped, demented thinking will persist until objective reality makes itself known with all the subtlety of a ship foundering upon the rocky shore.
As if Starcraft wasn't damage enough, now comes Starcraft 2. Millions of young South Korean men idling away their lives on multiplayer servers. I think Blizzard's done them more damage than the Japanese occupation.
Umm, that can be highly debated about Star Wars and The Matrix not existing before in some other medium. The Matrix takes, and references things from Alice in Wonderland (and various other Lewis Carroll books), Buddha and his teachings, Ghost in the Shell, and I can go on and on, but I'm too tired and lazy. District 9, however, takes reference from the South African apartheid and evictions of District 6. So, it's a sci-fi story that is more or less based in a real life conflict.
No story exists in a vacuum, true. Even LOTR, which invented the entire fantasy genre, borrowed heavily from prior sources. Shit, huge swaths of the Bible are little more than a pastiche of earlier religious works.
Star Wars and Matrix were both heavily derivative of earlier works, works most of us remained unfamiliar with. How many Americans were watching samurai movies in the 70's when Star Wars came out? Probably about the same number familiar with Wire-Fu when Matrix came out. For most people, these movies were their first taste.
Much as I love Star Wars, I think the source material there was just put in a blender and cleverly rearranged. Lucas brought the elements together and his team made a fun movie. With the Matrix, I think that the Wachowskis built something bigger and better on top of that source material, made something even greater than the sum of the parts. But they obviously did not consciously understand what they'd accomplished and made a hash of it trying to catch lighting in a bottle once more.
Are you saying that this movie is as good/groundbreaking as Star Wars or The Matrix? I am somewhat dubious.
Lots of movies have been billed as "the next star wars" but in terms of success and popular impact, the Matrix is the only one that really nailed it, at least as far as sci-fi's gone. I don't know if geeks will be having matrix-themed weddings decades from now but hey, it's already got ruinous sequels just like Star Wars!
I hear District 9 is good but will probably remain on the scifi geek list rather than crossing over into the mainstream like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. Probably more like a Blade Runner or Terminator 1 or 2. I wouldn't quite put LOTR on the same cultural impact comparison list since Star Wars and Matrix did not exist in any form before the theatrical release whereas LOTR has been loved for decades beforehand -- in other words, it had already made quite an impact before Peter Jackson touched it.
I stopped contributing to Wikipedia years ago. If you write an article, no matter how well-written, there's a good chance over 9,000 deletionists will pop up and go "HURR HURR NOT NOTABLE" and either speedy delete, prod, AfD, or some combination of the above. Those who cannot create instead focus on destroying.
This does seem to be a problem when the deletionists let personal opinion rule the day. For every piece of art or literature that one person can bring up and say is perfect beyond all criticism, I can find ten people who passionately believe otherwise. That's fine if you want to have a scholarly debate on the subject but impossible if the objectors have the ability to remove those works from public view.
There does seem to be a great petty tyrant element to these wars. It's frankly rather pathetic.
There's a hypothesis that CEOs are disproportionately selected for sociopathy. If that is true, particularly in the case of banks (which are too big to fail -- ie: they have a taxpayer sponsored safety net), then we have a vested interest in finding out if the hypothesis is true.
Given the lack of remorse, the ease with which they claim entitlement in the face of their own catastrophic failure, and that we have been left holding the tab, it seems that a concrete test like this might be reasonable.
I've got an image of giving blade runner tests to all people looking for promotion into the high ranks of management. "Your test results are so monstrous, you don't pass as human. No CEO slot for you."
Or we could just go the Jeff Foxworthy route.
"If you watch Schindler's List and see the part about the Nazis pulling out the gold fillings from the teeth and say 'Hey, there, now that's sound economic thinking!', you might be a sociopath."
"If you watched Old Yeller without crying, you might be a sociopath."
Somehow, I always find it amazing the things we don't know about. We know the makeup of the universe down to a couple of percentage points. We know what subatomic particles do what, and have theories to predict other ones that have virtually no effect on our universe. We know when the sun is going to run out of fuel and have pretty accurate theories about what will happen to the solar system when that happens.
Yet, somehow, we don't know the basic workings of our own bodies.
At first blush I'd want to question our supposed knowledge of those other heady areas of knowledge. Of course, that's not entirely the case. I'm partial to the book a Short History of Nearly Everything. If nothing else, it will help you appreciate how we came by certain bits of knowledge while missing other things.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking for myself, as a New Zealander, when I see African-looking people as the carefully-selected diverse-skin-tone group for a posed ad -- as opposed to Pacific Island or Asian, which are the faces we really see here -- it automatically makes me think "American". It's roughly the same effect as having people wearing cowboy hats and speaking in a twang.
So what you're saying is they should have photoshopped in sheep. Noted for future reference.
You don't consider all of the technological advances that stemmed from Apollo to be of real use? What about the scientific knowledge that was gained from study of the moon rocks we brought back?
It's like going to college for the booze and babes and neglecting an education. I'm not knocking booze and babes but you have to keep the bigger picture in mind. There's so much more we could have been doing all this time. Think of what advances could have been made if we followed up Apollo with a real exploration program instead of dicking around in LEO with the shuttle for decades on end?
I expect that you are underestimating the costs involved traveling through Earth's gravity well. I've heard that if a rock of solid gold were orbiting Earth, it would not be economically viable to de-orbit it. Unless we discover something out there that is fantastically valuable, "industry" will not be the motivating factor for space travel.
What's the worth of the only viable biosphere we know of? We're poisoning the planet with our civilization.
This gets right back to what I'm talking about, not adequately capturing the costs. Hey, I've got a stand of trees on my land. It helps retain the soil, provides habitat for rare animals, and keeps the local ecology sound. Cutting down the trees will negatively impact the watershed. Well, that's nice and all but I've got kids who need to eat. I'm cutting down the trees and farming that land. And that's exactly what's going to happen unless someone, say the local government, determines there's an economic benefit to keeping those trees there and will pay me the cash value of the opportunity cost of not farming the land. This is taking place on certain Caribbean islands right now. (not remembering the specific ones, I think it was mentioned in Guns, Germs, and Steel.)
So, we currently think it's not worth the effort to go up into space to get the big chunk of gold. Right now we think it's cheaper to do massive put strip-mining and use cyanide leeching to get at the gold. There's a huge environmental impact from the gold mining but the companies involved don't bear the burden of that cost so why should they give a flying fuck about it? But if we actually charged them for it, oh boy! That might spur the research it would take to make getting that orbiting gold asteroid profitable.
This gets right back to the classic libertarian oversight. "Hey, this is my land. I can do whatever I want on it. You ain't gonna tell me what to do!" Well, so long as what you do doesn't impact anyone, fine! Want to build a house? Fine. Want to hunt animals, keep it as a preserve? Fine! But hold on there, what's that you're doing, dumping chemicals? Sorry, buddy, you're hurting the local water table. That shit you're dumping doesn't respect property lines. We're going to have to tell you what you can and can't do when what you're doing has the potential of harming your neighbors. You give up your right to do whatever the hell you want on your land and in exchange you are protected from your neighbor doing whatever the hell he wants on his and endangering you. Unfortunately, we're liking the idea of socializing the risks of business while privatizing the profits.
If we really want to do anything with space, we need to start doing things with economic significance. The moon trip should have been about pioneering the way towards moon habitats, moon industry. In that case it would have been money well-spent. All we really did was plant a flag and thumb our noses at the Soviets. Entertaining but of little real use. Sure, there was some spin-off technology but we threw it all away.
Planting a flag on Mars would end up being a similar waste of time, not if we weren't going to follow it up with anything else.
If we were really serious about it, we'd look into moving heavy industry offworld. Prospect our nearby apollo objects, see about mining them. Put manufacturing in Earth orbit. The only thing that comes down to Earth would be finished products in nice, simple, recyclable dropshells.
We might want to look into solar power sats while we're at it.
If nothing else, at least space exploration and living offers us an engineering challenge of figuring out how to live minimally with minimal resources. Our problem in this day and age is that resources are too cheap and there's little incentive to save. If gas were a nickel a gallon, the only selling point for fuel efficiency would be not having to stop for gas as often. Gas costs more than that, of course, but it still doesn't cost enough for us to take conservation and fuel efficiency seriously. And we don't. It's just like the buffet. If you go to one that charges by the pound, you're careful about what you take. If you go to one that doesn't charge by the pound, you take as much as you want and are casually wasteful about what you leave on the plate. Simple human nature.
That might work for music but how is it going to work for software or movies that cost tens of millions (or more) to produce? I suppose movies could still make money from the theaters but what happens to the game industry?
Either a financier fronts them the money, they get a bank loan, or they work off of pre-orders. Joss Wheadon says he's looking for financing for a new show, fans pony up the money into an escrow. If he gets enough down, the series goes into production, knowing that there's a fixed number of guaranteed sales from the get-go and more could follow if the series is good.
As far as games go, companies might have to scale back a bit. Apogee and id made killings with the shareware model. Make a game in three parts, release the first to the world, offer the second two episodes for sale. This might seem risky when talking about a game with a $20 million budget but Jesus, should it really cost that much?
Games are a slightly different animal to consider here since piracy of them is more difficult, at least in the console world. Don't you need to put in a mod chip to pirate on something like the 360?
I can involve myself in one high-level function and monitor several low-level functions no problem. If I'm cooking and it's a recipe I know, I can have something on the telly in the background. Certainly not a movie or something that requires 100% focus but I can put the Daily Show or Colbert on no problem, just glancing over during the laughs to catch the sight gag. If it's a recipe I'm unfamiliar with, I have to focus 100%, no time for distractions.
Driving is another interesting case. When I was first learning, I couldn't have the radio on or even talk with a passenger. It was a new skill and consumed 100% of my attention to a ridiculous degree. As I became more comfortable with driving, I could take a more relaxed approach. I can hold a conversation with a passenger. I'm still doing my sweeps, checking mirrors, instrument panel, paying attention to the feel of the road, listening for anything odd, but it takes less effort to do all these things. But when conditions become more interesting, it takes more effort to retain situational awareness. I'll lose track of the conversation. This is the opposite of the way most people do it, the conversation distracting from the driving.
As a mostly monotasker, I'm very skeptical of multitaskers, bordering on contemptuous. It really irks me when I'm trying to work with someone who insists on multitasking to the point where you keep having to repeat yourself because he wasn't fucking listening in the first place. "No, I heard what you said. Just repeat it so I can understand." It's a sick, pathetic, constant pattern. I tell someone x is followed by y and z. They hear x and immediately ask about c. Well, c could be related in some instances but I already told you in this instance it's x, then y, then z. But wait, why is y there? That's the sequence. And then after several more rounds the person will exclaim with a sudden revelation "Why, this is x, then y, then z!" Of course, you numpty pillock. I've only been trying to tell you that for the last ten minutes. I'm going to rip that fucking bluetooth out of your ear, yank the battery from your iphone (they are removable if you use enough force) and make you focus for a goddamn minute!
If we take a look at the range of activities proscribed by the government, making no moral judgment here, just talking about stuff they don't want you to do, you'll never get rid of it. Take drugs. Some will say that the US is too permissive a society, that we can only get rid of them if we go totalitarian. You can't get more hardcore than Singapore, China, various Islamic countries with the death penalty for drug smuggling. Guess what? You can still get drugs there. China is doing their level best to suppress the Falun Gong and they're still around. The lions didn't do much to dissuade the Christians back in the early days. Ideas couldn't be suppressed when the only way to spread them was handwritten letters and walking tours. The printing press only made suppression more difficult and the internet is the printing press x100.
I suppose, in theory, one could impose filtering at the ISP level and stop the bulk of casual P2P traffic. But just think of what people did before the internet. Oh, that's right -- mix tapes for songs, file copy parties for software. There's just no way to stop it. If we still had Prohibition, that would be enough to stop me from drinking -- there's no way I'm going to risk so much for a shot of whiskey. But my lack of patronage wouldn't hurt the speakeasies a bit.
So, what would we see if total p2p filtering was successful? (which I still say it couldn't be.) Look at Cuba. Broadband costs too much there but flash drives are cheap. There's a thriving trade in flash drives, people copying and sharing away.
Ultimately, I think that the only viable solution will be a patronage system. The content will be given away for free and a tip jar will be set out for fans to contribute to. No, the vast majority of the people who watch the show won't be paying for it but if enough do so it can remain on the air, what's the problem? I'm sure the transition from our current media model will be a painful process but we're already seeing success in some areas.
always back up. use time machine.
try an in-place update. the installer should inform you if it is able to do an in-place update (it should be able to).
How does that work for backing up applications? I had problems with utorrent's updates and for some reason could not do a full uninstall to be rid of it, user settings were preserved. I later found out that there were configuration files stored under my user folder in applications and libraries. Ugh, you know if Apple is going to steal an idea from Microsoft it's going to be one of the dumb ones. (Incidentally, utorrent for mac is still buggerfucked. They haven't had a stable version out for months now. I can't understand it with the windows version of the product being so spiff.)
So if I do a fresh install, I then would plug in my external time machine drive and tell it to restore the given app to the folder? Do I also have to specify the app and library files?
Picked up a mini first of the year. This will be my very first upgrade.
As I understand it, the version numbers here are pretty much on par with a Microsoft OS version number so 10.5 to 10.6 will be like going from 98 to Win2k and should be handled the same way, upgrading will make for an unstable system so I should backup everything and do a fresh install. Is this conventional wisdom still correct?
Not all technological advancement happens at a steady, conformal pace - we can send probes to other worlds, put men in space, travel across the face of the earth in hours and yet we still rely on physicians making judgement calls about diagnoses?
We can investigate the fundamentals of the universe, the big bang and quantum physics, but we are yet to fully understand every step in the process of photosynthesis - one of the most widely used processes in life on this planet.
Yeah, but being able to understand genetics enough to create an avatar and remote link a mind to it seems to imply a very strong understanding of biology. The level of ridiculousness here would be like saying "Ok, so they have cyborgs in this universe, ones capable of passing for human, the AI's are very advanced, yet they still have people manually flying aircraft and driving vehicles, not just out of a sense of nostalgia but because it can't be done...Wait a sec!"
People were complaining about Firefly's wild west aspect with office towers and spaceships on one planet and nothing but horses and six-shooters on another. Well, we do have some pretty wild differences on this planet. Just look at the range of human technology depicted in District 9, cell phones in shanty towns. I could make a good argument that a farmer who has no certain access to outside resources would prefer an ox to a tractor since an ox is easier to fuel, two oxen can make more oxen, etc. A tractor could represent a recurring expense he cannot afford. And then to really blow your mind, he could use a solar-powered laptop with GPS to plot the lay of his fields. Hey, the laptop works for a long time if you don't break it and the sun's free...
Cameron said he wanted to make more 'alien' aliens, but that conflicted with one of the plot points... a human consciousness in an alien body, falling in love with another alien. He had to go with the humanoid look in order to not completely repulse the audience.
*imagines aliens looking like James Carville.* You're right. I withdraw my objection.
Jake has unwittingly been recruited to become part of this encroachment. Since humans are unable to breathe the air on Pandora, they have created genetically-bred human-Na'vi hybrids known as Avatars. The Avatars are living, breathing bodies in the real world, controlled by a human driver through a technology that links the driver's mind to the Avatar body. On Pandora, through his Avatar body, Jake can be whole once again. Moreover, he falls in love with a young Na'vi woman, Neytiri, whose beauty is matched by her ferocity in battle.
Humanoid aliens. *sigh* I can buy it if the scenario is along the lines of ancient astronauts where the humanoid aliens are actually genetically modified from human stock or something like a Stargate where human life is seeded on other worlds by powerful entities in the past but it does sort of irk me when humanoid lifeforms evolve independently with no other explanation than someone handwaving and saying "Perhaps the bipedal form is the most superior one for earth-like worlds." Bah. I'll only buy it if the explanation is "They don't look like us. We look like them!"
Dude, you've got too much time on your hands ;)
I rather liked the attitude that JMS had about this kind of stuff. One time a fan asked him "How fast do starfuries go?" and his response was "They move at the speed of plot"
If the plot makes sense and the universe remains consistent about it's own rules then who cares how functional RD2D would be in our universe or how badly designed the weapons of Star Trek are?
Part of proper world-building is making it make sense. I appreciate it when an artist goes about creating a mythical fantasy beast and puts effort into figuring out the biomechanics. I laugh when I see something like a four-armed giant depicted where he's drawn with a bog-standard human chest and the second set of arms is just shoved in a foot down from the first. No, a four-armed giant would have a chest a whole lot different from ours!
If you design a fantasy spaceship, figure out what the parts are for! Yes, it's all make-believe, but you end up with a stronger design if you can justify what you're slapping on the model. I had this argument with a designer on a project, he wanted to have all the clips on the guns curving backwards instead of forwards, just to be different. I asked him if he even knew why clips curved forward in the real world. He wasn't sure. I told him it was because bullets are slightly conic and if you stack them they would naturally curve. You don't really see that in handgun cartridges but it makes a difference for the kind you put in assault rifles. He finally conceded to reason there and the weapons looked more sensible as a result.
So, as for the guy's comments in order:
R2D2: yeah, it seems like he should have a voice chip, he could speak in text through the X-Wing's computer as we saw in Empire. But everyone seems to understand him just fine, Han understands Chewie just fine, so it's not an issue. R2D2 is like the Lassie of droids.
C3P0: The reason why he walks like he's got a rod up his ass is because it's a complicated, uncomfortable costume. I promise you he wouldn't walk like that if he were CGI.
Lightsaber: They're incredible dangerous weapons to begin with and you need to be a Jedi to use them. I don't think the Jedi even need handguards.
Blasters: it's all part of the scifi schtick. Given the tech level of star wars, a conventional gun would be just as likely to give you away. Today we've got special microphones and radar that can tell the secret service exactly where a gunshot came from. In 20 years, I would not be surprised if this tech was available in helmets and onboard displays could give an augmented reality flag to where the shooter came from. A blaster would be just as subtle.
Landspeeder: Are you serious? Rednecks drive their pickups without seatbelts all the time. I don't see belts on quadrunners. It would be more appropriate to ask about the lack of five-point restraints at the crewstations on Federation starships and why the consoles all carry safety grenades that explode in combat.
Death Star: Yeah, the unshielded reactor on the first one was dumb. Lucas wanted to steal the bombing sequence from the Dam Busters and needed a plausible reason to recreate that. This necessitated a starship as big as a moon to provide the landscape, a trench to fly down to be like the first movie and some suitable target at the end that could blow the whole thing up. There was historical precedent for something like this with the Bismarck where obsolete biplanes managed to land a single torpedo at the only point on the ship where they could do damage, the rudder. Didn't sink the Bismarck but rendered it lame and set the stage for the final surface battle which sunk her.
Stormtrooper outfits: Yeah, poor visibility in the helmets is a problem. Lucas wanted these guys to all be covered up and not visibly human because it removed the human association with violence. The troopers could just as easily have been Cylons in that getup. But you'd think the helmets would have
And by my Google search estimates a carrier only has enough fuel for about 1,000 flights before exhausting its supply and needing a tanker.
I imagine during combat operations that doesn't last terribly long. And having to pull along side another vessel and safely pumping that fuel has got to provide some pretty serious tactical limitations.
Last I heard, navy doctrine called for the carrier to be able to carry two weeks worth of fuel and munitions. That's two weeks worth at a heavy war tempo. The bigger question is how much this will shorten the reactor life on the ship. As was mentioned above, the reactors only run at peak when the ship is at flank speed. Typical operation is much slower and less intensive. There's something like a decade or more between refueling and that sort of thing usually coincides with yard work that has the ship laid up for a year or more. If the reactor chews through its fuel in a few years instead of a decade, that's going to cost a pretty chunk of change. So maybe they just reserve onboard fuel generation for wartime only?
You will be excluded from winning if you commit a crime in your efforts to find me, contact my family, or physically harm me.
How about if we locate him, then wait until he's just falling asleep, sneak into his bedroom and then say in a gravely voice "Tag, you're it"? Does scaring the pee out of someone count as physical harm?
I don't understand these studies about addictive gamers who are depressed, lonely, blah blah blah. Gaming, like watching tv dramas or sports or news, or listening to the radio or ipod, is simply a way to pass the time. Why gaming would make someone depressed makes zero sense to me.
I think the bit about "coping mechanism" is key. If we look at alcoholism, there are some people who are genetically predispositioned to be hooked. Those are the people whose problem is drinking itself. You'll have others who use alcohol as the coping mechanism. Could have been alcohol, could have been some other form of escapism. Plenty of normal people can enjoy alcohol without either becoming addicted or otherwise abusing it. The problem is not alcohol but how we use it.
I don't think you'll find anyone who could say bad things about books but lots of us geeks used them as coping mechanisms when we were young. I never related well with my classmates so I just retreated into my books. While it certainly did wonders for my vocabulary, it stunted my social development. You can never avoid dealing with people while having a successful life, not unless you can pull off being a JD Salinger or make your fortune before you go all Howard Hughes.
Video games do have an addictive component to them, just like gambling. It's an addictive behavior. Some people are naturally susceptible to getting sucked in to all that. A friend of mine mailed his whole game collection home from college after he realized he lost an entire day while playing one. His roommate flunked out thanks to Diablo. Could have just as easily been thanks to booze and partying but shit, they were in the engineering program.
So, back to your original question. People who lack self-control and fall into addictive behaviors can become sad and depressed because they fucked up their lives thanks to a stupid game. I'm sure we all remember reading about World of Warcraft and Evercrack flameouts here on Slashdot, threw away marriages and careers over the damn game. Then there's people who are already sad and depressed and frustrated with the world and escape into video games so that they can find a place where they feel they are in control. There was a good article discussing this very social mechanism in South Korea. You can also see this sort of thing with the otaku in Japan who end up becoming shut-ins, I forget the name for that. It's a severe social avoidance phobia where they lock themselves in their rooms and passive Japanese parenting approaches allow the state to persist for years. In Western countries this sort of thing would sooner rather than later lead to a violent confrontation and kicking the kid out of the house.
Or "space spooge" as the kids call it these days. So where'd that life come from?
...that irrespective of the situation, press releases are never going to say "this sucks" or "this is completely unoriginal". A few of these are genuine oversights/lack of forward thinking (e.g. the iPhone app one) but the majority of them are standard marketing hyperbole that appears everywhere ("This cleaning product will TRANSFORM YOUR LIFE!").
Life boils down to a question of whether people are talkin' the straight shit or just a line of bullshit. Bullshit pays more but the straight shit lets you look yourself in the mirror.
The funny thing, people love the bullshit. They bullshit others, they bullshit themselves. It amazes me when someone does due diligence, get told something that's true but they don't like it. This big deal I'm salivating over, it's smarter to pass it up than get all my money tied up in it? Fuck you. What, you're saying my income can only support getting the fancy house and the car, not the house, the car, and the yacht? Fuck you twice-over, cocksucker.
You get some exec with a grandiose plan, something that's really going to make his name, cement his reputation, there's no way of telling him it's just not that good of an idea. So any analyst who wants to remain employed will provide the analysis the boss wants to see, not what he needs to see. And this kind of warped, demented thinking will persist until objective reality makes itself known with all the subtlety of a ship foundering upon the rocky shore.
As if Starcraft wasn't damage enough, now comes Starcraft 2. Millions of young South Korean men idling away their lives on multiplayer servers. I think Blizzard's done them more damage than the Japanese occupation.
Umm, that can be highly debated about Star Wars and The Matrix not existing before in some other medium. The Matrix takes, and references things from Alice in Wonderland (and various other Lewis Carroll books), Buddha and his teachings, Ghost in the Shell, and I can go on and on, but I'm too tired and lazy. District 9, however, takes reference from the South African apartheid and evictions of District 6. So, it's a sci-fi story that is more or less based in a real life conflict.
No story exists in a vacuum, true. Even LOTR, which invented the entire fantasy genre, borrowed heavily from prior sources. Shit, huge swaths of the Bible are little more than a pastiche of earlier religious works.
Star Wars and Matrix were both heavily derivative of earlier works, works most of us remained unfamiliar with. How many Americans were watching samurai movies in the 70's when Star Wars came out? Probably about the same number familiar with Wire-Fu when Matrix came out. For most people, these movies were their first taste.
Much as I love Star Wars, I think the source material there was just put in a blender and cleverly rearranged. Lucas brought the elements together and his team made a fun movie. With the Matrix, I think that the Wachowskis built something bigger and better on top of that source material, made something even greater than the sum of the parts. But they obviously did not consciously understand what they'd accomplished and made a hash of it trying to catch lighting in a bottle once more.
Are you saying that this movie is as good/groundbreaking as Star Wars or The Matrix? I am somewhat dubious.
Lots of movies have been billed as "the next star wars" but in terms of success and popular impact, the Matrix is the only one that really nailed it, at least as far as sci-fi's gone. I don't know if geeks will be having matrix-themed weddings decades from now but hey, it's already got ruinous sequels just like Star Wars!
I hear District 9 is good but will probably remain on the scifi geek list rather than crossing over into the mainstream like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. Probably more like a Blade Runner or Terminator 1 or 2. I wouldn't quite put LOTR on the same cultural impact comparison list since Star Wars and Matrix did not exist in any form before the theatrical release whereas LOTR has been loved for decades beforehand -- in other words, it had already made quite an impact before Peter Jackson touched it.
I stopped contributing to Wikipedia years ago. If you write an article, no matter how well-written, there's a good chance over 9,000 deletionists will pop up and go "HURR HURR NOT NOTABLE" and either speedy delete, prod, AfD, or some combination of the above. Those who cannot create instead focus on destroying.
This does seem to be a problem when the deletionists let personal opinion rule the day. For every piece of art or literature that one person can bring up and say is perfect beyond all criticism, I can find ten people who passionately believe otherwise. That's fine if you want to have a scholarly debate on the subject but impossible if the objectors have the ability to remove those works from public view.
There does seem to be a great petty tyrant element to these wars. It's frankly rather pathetic.
There's a hypothesis that CEOs are disproportionately selected for sociopathy. If that is true, particularly in the case of banks (which are too big to fail -- ie: they have a taxpayer sponsored safety net), then we have a vested interest in finding out if the hypothesis is true.
http://www.google.com/search?q=sociopath+executive [google.com]
Given the lack of remorse, the ease with which they claim entitlement in the face of their own catastrophic failure, and that we have been left holding the tab, it seems that a concrete test like this might be reasonable.
I've got an image of giving blade runner tests to all people looking for promotion into the high ranks of management. "Your test results are so monstrous, you don't pass as human. No CEO slot for you."
Or we could just go the Jeff Foxworthy route.
"If you watch Schindler's List and see the part about the Nazis pulling out the gold fillings from the teeth and say 'Hey, there, now that's sound economic thinking!', you might be a sociopath."
"If you watched Old Yeller without crying, you might be a sociopath."
Somehow, I always find it amazing the things we don't know about. We know the makeup of the universe down to a couple of percentage points. We know what subatomic particles do what, and have theories to predict other ones that have virtually no effect on our universe. We know when the sun is going to run out of fuel and have pretty accurate theories about what will happen to the solar system when that happens.
Yet, somehow, we don't know the basic workings of our own bodies.
At first blush I'd want to question our supposed knowledge of those other heady areas of knowledge. Of course, that's not entirely the case. I'm partial to the book a Short History of Nearly Everything. If nothing else, it will help you appreciate how we came by certain bits of knowledge while missing other things.
(Yeah, I keep calling it the Large Hardon Collider. It's funny.)
CITATION NEEDED
Millions of snickering boys and men who can appreciate juvenile humor. It's inherently funny, like a banana or Sarah Palin speech.