Despite what people will say about the environmental side-effects, I still feel that Project Orion [wikipedia.org] is the best possible way for us to get back to space fast, and actually travel useful distances with a live crew.
I think you can still do that if you replace fission bombs with anti-matter bombs. Right now anti-matter costs a ridiculous amount of money per milligram and i think our world-wide supply is barely a gram but hell, aluminum used to be so expensive that only royalty used it for dining utensils.
Barring that, I've seen talk of closed cycle nuclear rockets that have the kind of performance necessary to make it into orbit. The exhaust on these beasties is perfectly clean and the nuclear container is supposed to be rugged enough to survive most crash scenarios. I've seen other people directly contradict these claims and I'm no nuclear engineer so I can't tell you who is more correct. I just know I'd like to see us doing something serious in space instead of the dicking around we're doing now. I want orbital habitats! I want solar power sats! I want zero-g swinger clubs -- but perhaps I've said too much.
I'm the last person to be advocating nose to the grindstone blah blah get your work done, Cratchet behavior. That being said, what's the possible point of having gaming consoles in the office? I much prefer the idea of get in, work hard, get out after 8 hours, don't put in more than 40 if you can help it. Time spent at home with family is worth more than any sort of office camaraderie, fakey or othewise.
When all the dotcom stuff was going on, I never could quite understand their idea of having game consoles in the office. If I worked there, I couldn't imagine playing on it myself because I would feel conspicuous, like I was goofing off on company time with a big sign over my head saying "pay attention, this is more flagrant than slashdot!"
Personally, I think goofing off for a coffee break on slashdot is great. Checking the news while waiting for a report to generate/program to compile/etc is perfectly acceptable. Maybe setting aside a night every week or two to play department vs. department FPS is cool. But for the most part, the best thing you can do for your people is make sure they can get in, get their work done quickly and efficiently, and get them out the door at quitting time. That does more for sanity than all the perks in the world.
I mean, it was cool and everything when we're talking about powered wheels pushing these suckers this fast. But when we're talking about what's essentially a jet aircraft using massive aerodynamic engineering to keep it wedded to the ground with fancy tires designed not to explode under the stress, it just seems ridiculous. It's a jet aircraft, let it fly above the ground and not be subject to the difficulties of staying in contact with the ground. If you still want to be pedantic and not make it a true airplane, maybe make it one of those ground effect aircraft like the eraktoplanes the Russians built, it can't fly above the ground effect air cushion.
1. People don't even know if they'll have jobs next week, would they really be taking on an expensive new phone and plan? 2. There's no absolute media saturation and frenzy over the G1. Apple is very adept at building their marketing campaigns into beasts like self-sustaining fusion reactions that produce more energy than they consume, like firestorms sucking all the oxygen out of the city. Media that doesn't even want to report on tech will end up reporting on the craze surrounding the tech. 3. The G1, while building on the success of Google, isn't coming with quite the same mac/ipod buzz that the iPhone had going with it. Again, this goes back to 2, Apple is building upon the wave of successful hype of previous products.
I hear that RIM is trying to improve upon their berries given all of this competition from Apple and Google. To that I say GREAT! The more competition the better. The last berry I used was a hell of a product but RIM has been floundering for a while now. I want to see them recapture the mojo instead of flaming out like Palm.
Personally, I don't know which phone I'll end up getting. I'm no longer working in a capacity that requires a company phone so I'm not likely to have another berry unless I change jobs. The iPhone is incredibly seductive but the data plan sucks and I don't like it being closed-architecture. I don't yet know enough about the G1 to know whether it'll be a good fit but I like what I've seen so far.
There are many memories that I would like to erase but I would like to also retain my memory of what it is I don't want to look at. What's the use of eradicating the distended anus from my mind if I go and innocently follow a goatse.cx link again? I'd rather it be like 2 girls 1 cup, I found out what that was before I ever clicked on it, thank Cthulhu.
Maybe we could implant a post-hypnotic warning in our brains, like when Gandalf tried to touch the One Ring and got the warning flash of evil in his brain? So if I mouse over to a link leading to 4chan I'll feel a cloud of evil pass over my mind and know not to click.
There are lots of games on that platform that I called "party games" before someone else coined the name "social games." By my definition, a party game has short play times between controller turnovers, are easy to learn and hard to master, and allow even the people who aren't playing to feel involved, usually by capping on how awful someone was at the game.
Soul Caliber was a great example of the 'hotseat' party game; only two people at a time could play but the rounds were quick and it was easy to hand the controller to someone else after you lost. I'm sure the same could be said of other fighting games but I never liked any other fighter as much as Soul Caliber, not even the SC sequels with their impossible balloon tits.
The various Wii sports titles take that fun aspect and moves it beyond the realm of traditional gaming genres, no robots and zombies and T&A. My mom tried out the Wii and it's the first system she's liked since the Odyssey. A system like this has huge, huge multi-generational appeal. Personally, I get a little bored with the Wii Sports games but I also don't like Microsoft Solitaire and that's the most popular Windows game ever so you can see why I don't trust my own opinion on such matters.:)
I see they've ported the old TMNT arcade game to the 360 and I assume they've included four controller support. That's another game that would kill at parties. There's also a Gauntlet port I see, one of the original four-players in the arcades. Pair that up with the big-screen TV's, party gaming can't help but to take off.
It's kind of funny, the basics of racing games haven't changed all that much since Pole Position: try to go fast, stay on the track, don't crash. But the graphics between then and now, heh! Amazing how much things have changed, the games look a thousand times better but it's still the same mechanics -- go fast, try not to crash.
These party games will go the same way, trying to present classic play mechanics in new and interesting ways. The motion controller was a genius move since many people find moving something around in the air more intuitive than pushing a joystick around, especially on today's fancy controllers.
Wow. My first hard drive was 20mb. I bought a keychain flash drive the other day with 16gb of storage. I can go on youtube and watch playthrough recordings of games that had me going ZOMGWTF!!! 15 years before that phrase was even coined. I remember being blown away by how incredibly awesome the newer Sierra adventure games were once they supported VGA graphics.
I remember how cool I thought it was when I could dub my dad's old sabbath records off onto a tape and bring my tunes with me on the go. It boggles the mind that I can fit dozens of albums on a single mp3 player. The Internet makes Asimov's concept of the Encyclopedia Galactica appear small and pathetic, we're seeing more and more scifi computer technology made real each and every day. Snow Crash, anyone? With how the economy's tanking, I expect burbclaves are just a few years off.
Makes me wonder what I'll be thinking given another ten years of progress, what will be boggling my mind then?
I am a polar bear. Don't bother to ask me how I managed to get on Slashdot and post this, you would never believe it.
However, I have been doing some estimations of my own. I have always wanted to figure out how many polar bears there are in the world. In my neighborhood here in the arctic, there aren't too many polar bears. About 350. I estimate that we roam over 20 square kilometers. Now, based on some observations I made from the bottom of a well, I figure the earth is around 500 million square kilometers. I haven't actually been outside of my corner of this world, but I imagine everything must be like it is here, and life must be exactly like it is here. I have no evidence to the contrary.
So, I figure there must be 25 million times 350 polar bears or 8.75 Billion of them.
But surely if there are that many bears, you should have heard from them by now, some tale of what it is like living in the southlands? So where could those bears possibly be, unless... something happened to those bears? Perhaps they attracted the attention of some malevolent force seeking to destroy bears. We do not hear from them because they are all dead! I've heard tales of the Colbert who stalks the southlands and had always assumed it to be a fairy story. Perhaps there is more to legend than we would believe.
The last time we tried to fork the US, it didn't work too well. But actually, I do think that this could be the germ of a new idea, experimental modes of government in test communities. People will argue the pro's and con's back and forth but until the theories have been put to the test, it's just speculation. The only problem I've seen is that when a bad idea is proven to be such in a proper experiment, the true believers won't say the idea was flawed, it simply was not applied with enough vigor. We're thus back where we started, only the true believers are crazier for it.
The thing I keep coming back to is that rigidly hierarchical models of direction and control were necessary in the pre-computer age. Just imagine trying to keep up with documents and records when they're all held on sheets of paper in real folders in real file drawers, just imagine trying to communicate with someone when long-distance communication is just scratchy phone lines and letters. It makes sense to concentrate all of the command and control in one place and issue orders from there, capital cities, corporate HQ's and all.
With modern telecommunications, it will be easier to push the brains of the organization out to the periphery. Just drawing from my own experience, I've worked in several different corporate environments starting with food services, then telecommunications, then a mixture of small and big shops for computers and financial services. The thing that really struck me about the chain stores is that they took away the initiative from the store manager. A place could not vary from corporate standard and while this sets a base line of acceptable quality, nobody was allowed to rise above that level, either. What also happened is that management refused to accept feedback from the stores, the front lines of the business, so when they tried to implement stupid ideas, they never got the feedback that it wasn't working; either they didn't ask for it or wouldn't listen.
Just talking about restaurants, the strength of the traditional franchise is national brand recognition, expensive marketing and research efforts to develop products for the menu, and a proven formula for success that simply needs to be adopted and adhered to. Of course, this also means that you'll often get crap. If I compare the local Denny's with the local breakfast and lunch place, there's no comparison, the local mom and pop kicks the shit out of Denny's and their "real breakfast" bullshit. Of course, Denny's gets huge advantages of scale with purchasing, etc.
What I think would be interesting is if the mom and pops could create co-ops to do the same thing nation-wide. "Look, we're all individuals but together we represent a thousand restaurants. We promise to buy in this quantity at these prices, and if anyone drops out, the rest of the members will pick up the slack." Very hard to do 30 years ago but with computers these days, should be far easier.
When I was a kid, the strength of the capitalist versus communist economies was described as demand versus command. Command economies tried to decide everything from the capital city and they really had no clue how many paperclips were needed, would set unrealistic production goals and would never have the right amount. A demand economy places the paperclip decision at the level of the people buying the paperclips and the people making the paperclips -- a better understanding of the need for paperclips helps limit the production to just as much as is necessary. This decentralizes the bureaucracy.
Can the same thing be done at the federal level? Break the monolithic agencies into smaller "franchises" with the same goal but offices spread throughout the nation, all following the same game plan but fully cognizant of what's going on at the front lines? Can we bring back a meritocracy where the successful succeed and the failures go away? That used to be the strength of the western capitalist economies but now we allow such concentration of resources in oversized companies that are "too big to fail" that we've arrived at the same inefficiencies as the communist nations.
umm, scales being unequal and all that jazz, you're still a bigot. mohammad didn't rape and slaughter thousands. he was elevated to the leader of his tribe as he gained more followers, and in a effort to protect him and his followers he lead muslims in war.
Led them in war, raping and slaughtering their enemies. Muhammad said that Christians and Jews were people of the book and to be protected but when his interests came into opposition with some Jewish merchants, he slaughtered them and took their shit. Dude, get with the pogrom!
its true that there was slavery in arabia at the time of mohammad, roughly 650 AD (i hear there was slavery in the US till not too long ago)... the religion brought rules and fair treatment of slaves to the a region that even the arabs now call a region plagued by 'jahilia' (ignorance). if you read the quran instead of spouted off charged sound bites, you'd know that the quran OK's the practice of slavery in one line, and in the next line says "but it is best if you set them free". repeatedly in the quran it talks about freeing a slave (the punishment for manslaughter, the cost of remarrying your wife, the cost of breaking your vow) and prohibits both the abuse of slaves and the sources of slaves to just prisoners of war.
How many people really read and understood the texts versus waving around unread copies of the book while using it to justify whatever the hell they already wanted to do? I mean honestly, did God really come down and tell the Israelites that Canaan was theirs or did the elders look down upon the fertile valley and say "Wow, this looks great. Now how are we going to convince our people to risk getting killed so we can have it? Oh, right: we're on a mission from God!"
personally i find the fact that this book, revealed in the 7th century to a people who
If by "revealed" you mean "made up"...
called themselves 'ignorant', just set up a system for the ethical treatment of slaves and prisoners of war in one deft move impressive. it also set the framework for abolitionism in the middle east a full 12 centuries before abe lincoln. the practice of slavery is now antiquated, and disgusting universally, and that includes the 1.2billion muslims in this world.
Tell that to the foreigners brought in to work as wage slaves and indentured servants in the prosperous Arab countries. Slavery is still in full effect, it's just been rebranded and marketed under another name.
regarding this supposed order to kill anyone who disagreed with them...? what? also in the quran, chapter 2, verse 256. "there is no compulsion in religion". and again throughout the quran it talks about people who refuse to believe, and it tells the believers to ignore them, that god has made them this way and that god will judge them fairly.
Yeah, just like Jesus says turn the other cheek. And how many wars were fought beneath a banner with a cross on it?
the quran was actually very very liberal a book in its time and in many ways still is.
It was invented by a murderer and asshole. But don't feel bad, the same goes for most religious books. And even if there's good stuff in there to read and reflect upon, the worst assholes out there are running off their own ignorant interpretation that justifies anything they already want to do. I mean, how else can you explain the just punishment for an unvirtuous woman to be a rape and beating by virtuous men? What, is carnal contact permitted so long as their cocks are doing the work of Allah? "Behold, woman, I fucketh thee in the name of Allah so you may know his justice and mercy!"
the problem with islam today is two-fold:
a) the majority of muslims suffer from a lack of education and are as a result easily swayyed and cowed and tricked by eloquent bastards who preach hatred (there's 1.2 billion of them, and they're
This is like a Christian fundie complaining about the amount of violence and blood in a Quentin Tarantino movie. Why the hell are you even watching it in the first place? Hardcore Islamics shouldn't be playing video games, I'm absolutely certain their interpretation of Islam bans anything that's fun, same as with the Baptists. Put down that controller before you go to hell, Yousef!
Wow, could you imagine if Christians were still angry, screaming people who cut off the heads of people they disagreed with? Like half of Japanese animation and video games would have to be pulled because of misappropriated Christian iconography and themes!
Dear Islamists: You want to interact with Western civilizations? Then learn to take your lumps. It is our tradition to grind up our sacred cows, mix them with a little bit of garlic, cracked black pepper, sea salt, throw them on the grill and make hamburgers out of 'em. The things nobody thinks should be made fun of are precisely the things that should. There's nobody more full of shit than a religious literalist fundamentalists and people like that need deflating, like lancing a boil.
But seriously, did anybody even threaten to cut off heads here or is this just a preemptive pussification, cowering over the mere possibility that this could get turned into Dutch political cartoons?
I find it kind of funny how there's the battle between wresting the most performance out of the hardware versus the ease of use for the programmers and users. Back in the day, every character was significant and code with too much documentation simply ate up too much space. (and this is talking about after we gave up on punch cards and were typing the code into terminal screens.) Every step we take to make computers easier to understand, easier to use makes the backend so much more complicated. A base install of XP is something like what, tens of thousands of times larger than DOS? But it's also thousands of times more powerful. But at the same time, we can sacrifice too much. I could run Win2k and Office 97 just fine on a good machine from 1999, it would still suffice for the typical office worker even today. Of course, that machine cost around $1000 back then and a basic office machine with so much more power goes for $600 today, including the Vista tax, but wait, Office is gonna ding you another $600 now. Funny how the cost of software used to be the cheapest part of the machine and now it's become the most painful. But also, when you get right back to it, the secretary isn't typing her letters an faster on the newer machine. There's probably nothing she needs in any of the newer versions of Office that she didn't have in 97.
It just strikes me as kind of funny how we make these huge advances in performance, in hardware capability, and it seems like the software is really lagging behind in the effort to fully exploit these gains. But then I look at how hard it is to write the code and it's amazing we've come even this far.
I haven't gotten the chills from a game since Doom2. Thinking back, I wonder if now I would get the same feeling. I guess part of it's realism, but as/more important is the immersion. I've not been able to turn up the volume, shit the door and leave the real world in a while.
Doom was good, the Aliens conversion WAD was scary as shit. Just the sound effects were enough to creep me the hell out. Crank that shit in a dark room at night, lit only by the glow of your screen...
The original AVP was pretty scary. I eventually got used to the speed of the aliens but shit, the first time I encountered them I was spraying the walls in panic, shooting everything but the alien! That game had lighting effects like you wouldn't believe. It also kind of squicked me playing as the alien or predator because the humans would panic and the civilians would cower in the corner crying, scared out of their pink little minds. I think they could make future games a lot more horrifying by making the characters seem more real, it hurts more when the monster gets them. While the Half-Life 2 games were disappointing in how much they didn't push the envelope, I did like seeing science chick come a bit unglued due to the stuff she saw. A lovecraftian mental breakdown would really help set the mood.
The wireless headphones these days are really good, you can crank this stuff in your game room and not wake the rest of the house.
I never had a chance to play the Silent Hill series back in the day but the footage I've seen of it is very impressive. I plan on getting the new one coming out for the 360 if it's any good. Games these days can do so much more with sound design, atmosphere, real acting... GTA4 is playing for homage and parody of gangland movies. I can only imagine what it would be like if those skills and techniques were put towards a horror-themed game.
Laugh it up, but the reason Obama got a seat in the senate in 2004 so easily is because his predecessor was forced to step down after his tearful ex told a divorce court that he made her go to a swinger's club with him. On such things the fate of nations hang, sometimes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ryan_(2004_U.S._Senate_candidate) [wikipedia.org]
Yeah, but his wife was 60 of 9 from Voyager. Who the hell needs more woman than that? (and for the record, I can't stand Voyager but she still has a huge rack.)
I thought this over way back. I retired from video games after MK3, just before the height of the advent of MMOs. The effort/reward ratios were changing.
single player is still fun, I'm enjoying the hell out of GTA4. I've tried multiplayer there and, while fun, I obviously still suck at it. That's the kind of multiplayer I'll do, the kind I can sit down for a few months and pick up and nothing's different. MMO's are too much like work.
A co-worker is trying to convince me to play WOW. I keep telling him "No." He's like oh, it looks awesome! It's fun! "I'm sure you're right. That's exactly why I'm not trying it." Damn, it's like working alongside the pusher man, goddamn the pusher man.
I'm not thinking he's wrong about the game, I'm sure he's right. And I need a gaming jones just like I need to get hooked on crack.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite what people will say about the environmental side-effects, I still feel that Project Orion [wikipedia.org] is the best possible way for us to get back to space fast, and actually travel useful distances with a live crew.
I think you can still do that if you replace fission bombs with anti-matter bombs. Right now anti-matter costs a ridiculous amount of money per milligram and i think our world-wide supply is barely a gram but hell, aluminum used to be so expensive that only royalty used it for dining utensils.
Barring that, I've seen talk of closed cycle nuclear rockets that have the kind of performance necessary to make it into orbit. The exhaust on these beasties is perfectly clean and the nuclear container is supposed to be rugged enough to survive most crash scenarios. I've seen other people directly contradict these claims and I'm no nuclear engineer so I can't tell you who is more correct. I just know I'd like to see us doing something serious in space instead of the dicking around we're doing now. I want orbital habitats! I want solar power sats! I want zero-g swinger clubs -- but perhaps I've said too much.
..or else you'll be seeing the Chinese on the moon first...
Ahem [link to Apollo 11 wikipedia.org]
He means for real this time.
I told you to scrape Slashdot, not read it. Now get back to work!
If I were to monitor these gerbils I would be disappointed by Gerbil 2's work ethic.
If you could only keep one gerbil and send the other to Richard Gear's house, which one would you keep?
I guess it would depend on whether I did the things with gerbils that Richard Gere does.
I'm the last person to be advocating nose to the grindstone blah blah get your work done, Cratchet behavior. That being said, what's the possible point of having gaming consoles in the office? I much prefer the idea of get in, work hard, get out after 8 hours, don't put in more than 40 if you can help it. Time spent at home with family is worth more than any sort of office camaraderie, fakey or othewise.
When all the dotcom stuff was going on, I never could quite understand their idea of having game consoles in the office. If I worked there, I couldn't imagine playing on it myself because I would feel conspicuous, like I was goofing off on company time with a big sign over my head saying "pay attention, this is more flagrant than slashdot!"
Personally, I think goofing off for a coffee break on slashdot is great. Checking the news while waiting for a report to generate/program to compile/etc is perfectly acceptable. Maybe setting aside a night every week or two to play department vs. department FPS is cool. But for the most part, the best thing you can do for your people is make sure they can get in, get their work done quickly and efficiently, and get them out the door at quitting time. That does more for sanity than all the perks in the world.
Oh, right. Could they manage to fuel the robots off of metabolized human flesh? Oh, and make their heads look like skulls.
Warn me about the stars that sound like "come to daddy" or "windowlicker."
I mean, it was cool and everything when we're talking about powered wheels pushing these suckers this fast. But when we're talking about what's essentially a jet aircraft using massive aerodynamic engineering to keep it wedded to the ground with fancy tires designed not to explode under the stress, it just seems ridiculous. It's a jet aircraft, let it fly above the ground and not be subject to the difficulties of staying in contact with the ground. If you still want to be pedantic and not make it a true airplane, maybe make it one of those ground effect aircraft like the eraktoplanes the Russians built, it can't fly above the ground effect air cushion.
1. People don't even know if they'll have jobs next week, would they really be taking on an expensive new phone and plan?
2. There's no absolute media saturation and frenzy over the G1. Apple is very adept at building their marketing campaigns into beasts like self-sustaining fusion reactions that produce more energy than they consume, like firestorms sucking all the oxygen out of the city. Media that doesn't even want to report on tech will end up reporting on the craze surrounding the tech.
3. The G1, while building on the success of Google, isn't coming with quite the same mac/ipod buzz that the iPhone had going with it. Again, this goes back to 2, Apple is building upon the wave of successful hype of previous products.
I hear that RIM is trying to improve upon their berries given all of this competition from Apple and Google. To that I say GREAT! The more competition the better. The last berry I used was a hell of a product but RIM has been floundering for a while now. I want to see them recapture the mojo instead of flaming out like Palm.
Personally, I don't know which phone I'll end up getting. I'm no longer working in a capacity that requires a company phone so I'm not likely to have another berry unless I change jobs. The iPhone is incredibly seductive but the data plan sucks and I don't like it being closed-architecture. I don't yet know enough about the G1 to know whether it'll be a good fit but I like what I've seen so far.
They can spend twice that much money and only deliver a tenth of the functionality! That's a win! I think.
There are many memories that I would like to erase but I would like to also retain my memory of what it is I don't want to look at. What's the use of eradicating the distended anus from my mind if I go and innocently follow a goatse.cx link again? I'd rather it be like 2 girls 1 cup, I found out what that was before I ever clicked on it, thank Cthulhu.
Maybe we could implant a post-hypnotic warning in our brains, like when Gandalf tried to touch the One Ring and got the warning flash of evil in his brain? So if I mouse over to a link leading to 4chan I'll feel a cloud of evil pass over my mind and know not to click.
There are lots of games on that platform that I called "party games" before someone else coined the name "social games." By my definition, a party game has short play times between controller turnovers, are easy to learn and hard to master, and allow even the people who aren't playing to feel involved, usually by capping on how awful someone was at the game.
Soul Caliber was a great example of the 'hotseat' party game; only two people at a time could play but the rounds were quick and it was easy to hand the controller to someone else after you lost. I'm sure the same could be said of other fighting games but I never liked any other fighter as much as Soul Caliber, not even the SC sequels with their impossible balloon tits.
The various Wii sports titles take that fun aspect and moves it beyond the realm of traditional gaming genres, no robots and zombies and T&A. My mom tried out the Wii and it's the first system she's liked since the Odyssey. A system like this has huge, huge multi-generational appeal. Personally, I get a little bored with the Wii Sports games but I also don't like Microsoft Solitaire and that's the most popular Windows game ever so you can see why I don't trust my own opinion on such matters. :)
I see they've ported the old TMNT arcade game to the 360 and I assume they've included four controller support. That's another game that would kill at parties. There's also a Gauntlet port I see, one of the original four-players in the arcades. Pair that up with the big-screen TV's, party gaming can't help but to take off.
It's kind of funny, the basics of racing games haven't changed all that much since Pole Position: try to go fast, stay on the track, don't crash. But the graphics between then and now, heh! Amazing how much things have changed, the games look a thousand times better but it's still the same mechanics -- go fast, try not to crash.
These party games will go the same way, trying to present classic play mechanics in new and interesting ways. The motion controller was a genius move since many people find moving something around in the air more intuitive than pushing a joystick around, especially on today's fancy controllers.
Wow. My first hard drive was 20mb. I bought a keychain flash drive the other day with 16gb of storage. I can go on youtube and watch playthrough recordings of games that had me going ZOMGWTF!!! 15 years before that phrase was even coined. I remember being blown away by how incredibly awesome the newer Sierra adventure games were once they supported VGA graphics.
I remember how cool I thought it was when I could dub my dad's old sabbath records off onto a tape and bring my tunes with me on the go. It boggles the mind that I can fit dozens of albums on a single mp3 player. The Internet makes Asimov's concept of the Encyclopedia Galactica appear small and pathetic, we're seeing more and more scifi computer technology made real each and every day. Snow Crash, anyone? With how the economy's tanking, I expect burbclaves are just a few years off.
Makes me wonder what I'll be thinking given another ten years of progress, what will be boggling my mind then?
I am a polar bear. Don't bother to ask me how I managed to get on Slashdot and post this, you would never believe it.
However, I have been doing some estimations of my own. I have always wanted to figure out how many polar bears there are in the world. In my neighborhood here in the arctic, there aren't too many polar bears. About 350. I estimate that we roam over 20 square kilometers. Now, based on some observations I made from the bottom of a well, I figure the earth is around 500 million square kilometers. I haven't actually been outside of my corner of this world, but I imagine everything must be like it is here, and life must be exactly like it is here. I have no evidence to the contrary.
So, I figure there must be 25 million times 350 polar bears or 8.75 Billion of them.
But surely if there are that many bears, you should have heard from them by now, some tale of what it is like living in the southlands? So where could those bears possibly be, unless... something happened to those bears? Perhaps they attracted the attention of some malevolent force seeking to destroy bears. We do not hear from them because they are all dead! I've heard tales of the Colbert who stalks the southlands and had always assumed it to be a fairy story. Perhaps there is more to legend than we would believe.
The last time we tried to fork the US, it didn't work too well. But actually, I do think that this could be the germ of a new idea, experimental modes of government in test communities. People will argue the pro's and con's back and forth but until the theories have been put to the test, it's just speculation. The only problem I've seen is that when a bad idea is proven to be such in a proper experiment, the true believers won't say the idea was flawed, it simply was not applied with enough vigor. We're thus back where we started, only the true believers are crazier for it.
The thing I keep coming back to is that rigidly hierarchical models of direction and control were necessary in the pre-computer age. Just imagine trying to keep up with documents and records when they're all held on sheets of paper in real folders in real file drawers, just imagine trying to communicate with someone when long-distance communication is just scratchy phone lines and letters. It makes sense to concentrate all of the command and control in one place and issue orders from there, capital cities, corporate HQ's and all.
With modern telecommunications, it will be easier to push the brains of the organization out to the periphery. Just drawing from my own experience, I've worked in several different corporate environments starting with food services, then telecommunications, then a mixture of small and big shops for computers and financial services. The thing that really struck me about the chain stores is that they took away the initiative from the store manager. A place could not vary from corporate standard and while this sets a base line of acceptable quality, nobody was allowed to rise above that level, either. What also happened is that management refused to accept feedback from the stores, the front lines of the business, so when they tried to implement stupid ideas, they never got the feedback that it wasn't working; either they didn't ask for it or wouldn't listen.
Just talking about restaurants, the strength of the traditional franchise is national brand recognition, expensive marketing and research efforts to develop products for the menu, and a proven formula for success that simply needs to be adopted and adhered to. Of course, this also means that you'll often get crap. If I compare the local Denny's with the local breakfast and lunch place, there's no comparison, the local mom and pop kicks the shit out of Denny's and their "real breakfast" bullshit. Of course, Denny's gets huge advantages of scale with purchasing, etc.
What I think would be interesting is if the mom and pops could create co-ops to do the same thing nation-wide. "Look, we're all individuals but together we represent a thousand restaurants. We promise to buy in this quantity at these prices, and if anyone drops out, the rest of the members will pick up the slack." Very hard to do 30 years ago but with computers these days, should be far easier.
When I was a kid, the strength of the capitalist versus communist economies was described as demand versus command. Command economies tried to decide everything from the capital city and they really had no clue how many paperclips were needed, would set unrealistic production goals and would never have the right amount. A demand economy places the paperclip decision at the level of the people buying the paperclips and the people making the paperclips -- a better understanding of the need for paperclips helps limit the production to just as much as is necessary. This decentralizes the bureaucracy.
Can the same thing be done at the federal level? Break the monolithic agencies into smaller "franchises" with the same goal but offices spread throughout the nation, all following the same game plan but fully cognizant of what's going on at the front lines? Can we bring back a meritocracy where the successful succeed and the failures go away? That used to be the strength of the western capitalist economies but now we allow such concentration of resources in oversized companies that are "too big to fail" that we've arrived at the same inefficiencies as the communist nations.
Not being a follower, but having read the bible, I always wondered why, despite being referred to as male, "God" got emasculated in the new testament.
He settled down and had a kid.
Who's the mother? A marriage is between a man and woman and I don't see how a single dad could have a son without a wife. That's just unchristian.
umm, scales being unequal and all that jazz, you're still a bigot. mohammad didn't rape and slaughter thousands. he was elevated to the leader of his tribe as he gained more followers, and in a effort to protect him and his followers he lead muslims in war.
Led them in war, raping and slaughtering their enemies. Muhammad said that Christians and Jews were people of the book and to be protected but when his interests came into opposition with some Jewish merchants, he slaughtered them and took their shit. Dude, get with the pogrom!
its true that there was slavery in arabia at the time of mohammad, roughly 650 AD (i hear there was slavery in the US till not too long ago)... the religion brought rules and fair treatment of slaves to the a region that even the arabs now call a region plagued by 'jahilia' (ignorance). if you read the quran instead of spouted off charged sound bites, you'd know that the quran OK's the practice of slavery in one line, and in the next line says "but it is best if you set them free". repeatedly in the quran it talks about freeing a slave (the punishment for manslaughter, the cost of remarrying your wife, the cost of breaking your vow) and prohibits both the abuse of slaves and the sources of slaves to just prisoners of war.
How many people really read and understood the texts versus waving around unread copies of the book while using it to justify whatever the hell they already wanted to do? I mean honestly, did God really come down and tell the Israelites that Canaan was theirs or did the elders look down upon the fertile valley and say "Wow, this looks great. Now how are we going to convince our people to risk getting killed so we can have it? Oh, right: we're on a mission from God!"
personally i find the fact that this book, revealed in the 7th century to a people who
If by "revealed" you mean "made up"...
called themselves 'ignorant', just set up a system for the ethical treatment of slaves and prisoners of war in one deft move impressive. it also set the framework for abolitionism in the middle east a full 12 centuries before abe lincoln. the practice of slavery is now antiquated, and disgusting universally, and that includes the 1.2billion muslims in this world.
Tell that to the foreigners brought in to work as wage slaves and indentured servants in the prosperous Arab countries. Slavery is still in full effect, it's just been rebranded and marketed under another name.
regarding this supposed order to kill anyone who disagreed with them...? what? also in the quran, chapter 2, verse 256. "there is no compulsion in religion". and again throughout the quran it talks about people who refuse to believe, and it tells the believers to ignore them, that god has made them this way and that god will judge them fairly.
Yeah, just like Jesus says turn the other cheek. And how many wars were fought beneath a banner with a cross on it?
the quran was actually very very liberal a book in its time and in many ways still is.
It was invented by a murderer and asshole. But don't feel bad, the same goes for most religious books. And even if there's good stuff in there to read and reflect upon, the worst assholes out there are running off their own ignorant interpretation that justifies anything they already want to do. I mean, how else can you explain the just punishment for an unvirtuous woman to be a rape and beating by virtuous men? What, is carnal contact permitted so long as their cocks are doing the work of Allah? "Behold, woman, I fucketh thee in the name of Allah so you may know his justice and mercy!"
the problem with islam today is two-fold:
a) the majority of muslims suffer from a lack of education and are as a result easily swayyed and cowed and tricked by eloquent bastards who preach hatred (there's 1.2 billion of them, and they're
This is like a Christian fundie complaining about the amount of violence and blood in a Quentin Tarantino movie. Why the hell are you even watching it in the first place? Hardcore Islamics shouldn't be playing video games, I'm absolutely certain their interpretation of Islam bans anything that's fun, same as with the Baptists. Put down that controller before you go to hell, Yousef!
Wow, could you imagine if Christians were still angry, screaming people who cut off the heads of people they disagreed with? Like half of Japanese animation and video games would have to be pulled because of misappropriated Christian iconography and themes!
Dear Islamists: You want to interact with Western civilizations? Then learn to take your lumps. It is our tradition to grind up our sacred cows, mix them with a little bit of garlic, cracked black pepper, sea salt, throw them on the grill and make hamburgers out of 'em. The things nobody thinks should be made fun of are precisely the things that should. There's nobody more full of shit than a religious literalist fundamentalists and people like that need deflating, like lancing a boil.
But seriously, did anybody even threaten to cut off heads here or is this just a preemptive pussification, cowering over the mere possibility that this could get turned into Dutch political cartoons?
I find it kind of funny how there's the battle between wresting the most performance out of the hardware versus the ease of use for the programmers and users. Back in the day, every character was significant and code with too much documentation simply ate up too much space. (and this is talking about after we gave up on punch cards and were typing the code into terminal screens.) Every step we take to make computers easier to understand, easier to use makes the backend so much more complicated. A base install of XP is something like what, tens of thousands of times larger than DOS? But it's also thousands of times more powerful. But at the same time, we can sacrifice too much. I could run Win2k and Office 97 just fine on a good machine from 1999, it would still suffice for the typical office worker even today. Of course, that machine cost around $1000 back then and a basic office machine with so much more power goes for $600 today, including the Vista tax, but wait, Office is gonna ding you another $600 now. Funny how the cost of software used to be the cheapest part of the machine and now it's become the most painful. But also, when you get right back to it, the secretary isn't typing her letters an faster on the newer machine. There's probably nothing she needs in any of the newer versions of Office that she didn't have in 97.
It just strikes me as kind of funny how we make these huge advances in performance, in hardware capability, and it seems like the software is really lagging behind in the effort to fully exploit these gains. But then I look at how hard it is to write the code and it's amazing we've come even this far.
I haven't gotten the chills from a game since Doom2. Thinking back, I wonder if now I would get the same feeling. I guess part of it's realism, but as/more important is the immersion. I've not been able to turn up the volume, shit the door and leave the real world in a while.
Doom was good, the Aliens conversion WAD was scary as shit. Just the sound effects were enough to creep me the hell out. Crank that shit in a dark room at night, lit only by the glow of your screen...
The original AVP was pretty scary. I eventually got used to the speed of the aliens but shit, the first time I encountered them I was spraying the walls in panic, shooting everything but the alien! That game had lighting effects like you wouldn't believe. It also kind of squicked me playing as the alien or predator because the humans would panic and the civilians would cower in the corner crying, scared out of their pink little minds. I think they could make future games a lot more horrifying by making the characters seem more real, it hurts more when the monster gets them. While the Half-Life 2 games were disappointing in how much they didn't push the envelope, I did like seeing science chick come a bit unglued due to the stuff she saw. A lovecraftian mental breakdown would really help set the mood.
The wireless headphones these days are really good, you can crank this stuff in your game room and not wake the rest of the house.
I never had a chance to play the Silent Hill series back in the day but the footage I've seen of it is very impressive. I plan on getting the new one coming out for the 360 if it's any good. Games these days can do so much more with sound design, atmosphere, real acting... GTA4 is playing for homage and parody of gangland movies. I can only imagine what it would be like if those skills and techniques were put towards a horror-themed game.
I ain't clicking? What's Mr. Hands, and don't go Morpheus on me and say it cannot be explained, I have to see it for myself.
Laugh it up, but the reason Obama got a seat in the senate in 2004 so easily is because his predecessor was forced to step down after his tearful ex told a divorce court that he made her go to a swinger's club with him. On such things the fate of nations hang, sometimes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ryan_(2004_U.S._Senate_candidate) [wikipedia.org]
Yeah, but his wife was 60 of 9 from Voyager. Who the hell needs more woman than that? (and for the record, I can't stand Voyager but she still has a huge rack.)
I thought this over way back. I retired from video games after MK3, just before the height of the advent of MMOs. The effort/reward ratios were changing.
single player is still fun, I'm enjoying the hell out of GTA4. I've tried multiplayer there and, while fun, I obviously still suck at it. That's the kind of multiplayer I'll do, the kind I can sit down for a few months and pick up and nothing's different. MMO's are too much like work.
A co-worker is trying to convince me to play WOW. I keep telling him "No." He's like oh, it looks awesome! It's fun! "I'm sure you're right. That's exactly why I'm not trying it." Damn, it's like working alongside the pusher man, goddamn the pusher man.
I'm not thinking he's wrong about the game, I'm sure he's right. And I need a gaming jones just like I need to get hooked on crack.