if I wouldn't end up on a spamlist for every new tree-hugging wackjob cause that comes down the pike.
Because being against telco immunity means your a tree-hugger? WTF?
Who taps trees? Canadians and people from Vermont. Why do they tap trees? Maple syrup! Now could you imagine what would happen if they used wires in those taps? The syrup could get electolytes! And before you know it, Gatorade will have a maple-flavored sports drink.
So he's obviously either for or against maple-flavored Gatorade.
To pay for a rocket, it would have to be a very rare material. Like plutonium - of course, we already have rockets ready to deliver those in 90 minutes or less!
The great irony of this, is that everyone on the board thinks that the studio can just arbitrarily make a good movie button.
"well, just make a good movie", betrays a total lack of understanding for the arts.
No one really knows a canned formula for making a good movie. A studio can do everything that it thinks will make a movie, best writers, best directors, best actors, and that doesn't guarantee a good picture at all. If you had 100 guys in a room, each of which with their own ideas, how do you know which of those is going to make a movie that will gross 300 million dollars? Clearly, if it was so easy to make a hit movie, then, don't you think they would do it. And, even if they did have a formula to make hit movies, half of the people on this board would be complaining that movies are formulaic.
You're missing the point. "Nobody ever sets out to make a bad movie," you say, and I say "Yeah, but they're not setting out to make great movies." It all comes down to project management. Does the project have the support of the money men? Do they put someone in charge of the project who will eat, sleep and breathe it? Will they trust in his judgment and limit external interference? Was the project even a good idea from the start?
Often times these movies can be seen as flawed undertakings right from the start but politics and egotism will prevent anyone from pointing that out. Are you going to be the one to tell Hitler invading Russia in the winter is a bad idea? May as well tell your girlfriend it's not the pants but her ass that makes her ass look fat. Some fool decided to give Transformers a greenlight. Are you going to be an even bigger fool and tell them it was a bad idea?
Some of the best and worst movies ever made have been driven by visionary men given almost dictatorial powers over the project. The Matrix as a triumph of tight focus and vision. Of course, the sequels show how directors can drive it into the ground. Lucas served as a catalyst for developing Star Wars, the give and take of the process making for a stronger product. He got too much control in the prequels and drove 'em into the ground. The LOTR trilogy is a triumph of this theory. Jackson had the drive, he gathered a brilliant team, and he achieved a miracle. That he then went on immediately after to pinch off a giant monkey turd of a Kong remake shows the theory is now flawless.
As good as those movies can be and as bad as they can be, I've yet to see a movie produced by a committee that did any better than middling. Often times such movies would compete with the very worst results of the bigshot directors.
Ultimately, I think the reason why we see design by committee and timid, uninspired leadership here is that we're looking at the "sons of great men" problem. When we talk of great men, the sons are rarely the equal of the fathers. If a king is good, his son is likely to be poor at best, more likely catastrophic. Founders can bring a business from nothing to world-leader in a single lifetime but when they and their fellows grow old and retire, the company can end up in the hands of bureaucrats who enjoy the profits of the business but lack an understanding of how it truly operates, of where they should be going. The very act of starting a business is a tremendous gamble, most fail. But now that the business is established, the management wants safe, predictable returns. (On the other hand, hired-gun CEO's will come in and gut the place, spike the stock, and cash out -- they don't care about the company's longevity.)
The final point to bring up is that art is the last thing on the minds of the money people running the show. The purpose of running a TV network is advertising. TV shows are nothing more than a means of keeping you glued to the seat during commercial breaks. Execs could give a fuck less about what it is that keeps you there during the breaks, they just want to make sure it's effective. You want police procedurals? Sitcoms? Oh, reality shows are doing great, Am
The nice thing about robomissions is that they are so much cheaper than manned missions and there are no widows when things do wrong.
And yet all it would take is for a human to crumble the soil in his hand.
robotic-monotone ***Bzzzt***... Alas, I, POLAREXPLORER, for all the power of my mighty hydraulic crushing claw, cannot duplicate the qualities of a human hand. ***Bzzzraaat*** Next you will tell me cold logic circuits cannot match the sublime qualities of the human heart. ***gzzzzrp*** Tell me of this thing you fleshlings call love.
How many of those are automatically generated rank-spoofers, 80%?
My favorite spoof pages were the ones that randomly substituted search terms into porno stories.
"Yes!" she screamed as he thrust his SAMSUNG CD PLAYER deep into her. "I want you balls-deep in my CHEAP HARD DRIVES!" The smell of DISCOUNT SOFTWARE filled the room.
I don't think cartoon network needs full bandwith just so it can show powerpuff girls in full 1080p
I disagree.
Could you please move on to Erin Esurence? Not only are the Powerpuffs underage, they don't even have digits. That's just wrong. Not that Esurence is right, it's just less wrong.
Back in the good old days people who leaked a big conspiracy disappeared. Ever since the first Kennedy assassination, the Powers That Be have discovered that the best way to deal with leaks is to just have more and more leaks and bury the truth in a million similar sounding lies.
Suppose Mitchell's right and there really is a big alien contact conspiracy that's being covered up? We've all seen so many photos of streetlights coming from crazy/misguided people that the best policy from the conspiracy's point of view would be to let him yammer on and throw out a lot of phony alien contact crap. They don't have to discredit him, we'd all do that for them.
It goes a lot further than that. Set aside any talk of tinfoil conspiracy stuff, let's just talk about stuff that's been widely confirmed in newspapers around the world. Do Americans care? Nope! The Soviet approach is to crush anything the State disagrees with, make it forbidden, tempting, the sort of thing dissident minds would seek out. The American approach allows all sorts of information to be published but keeps the the poor too overworked to think, the middle-class to entertained to care, and the ruling class is perfectly happy exactly the way things are.
And this is the nexus of tinfoil hattery and apathy -- someone comes out speaking the truth and people are either dismiss the guy as a nut or are too apathetic to care.
I don't buy the "space alien" story for the simple reason that the "Area 51" aliens look too much like us. Bipedal, five fingers, five toes, two eyes, one two holed nose, one mouth. Look at the diversity of life on earth, with hooved animals, pipedaal animals with feathers, squids, six legged insects and eight legged spiders, no legged snakes. And all of these creatures presumably evolved from the first earthly protolife, as we've never seen life sponaneously appear since, nor have we been able to cause it to spontaneously appear.
They're humans from the future, what we evolved into, coming back to the past in order to reshape it. That's always been my favorite explanation, it means Skynet didn't win.
But step back from that philosophical stuff, and imagine that why would there be another species similar humans? I think people think aliens, they think human with different features with similar concepts of life, death, morals, social "revealing" ( would they even understand what that is? ) rather then something so foreign, we couldn't even begin to understand it, nor its motivations, if it has those?
Sci fi is fun because we graft human behavior on something different, and its fun for us to say ooh look they are just like us. But in the end it is just the human ego projection our emotions on something else.
The other reason for this is because it is astonishingly hard to tell a good story with alien characters who have no common ground with humans. We tell human-centric stories with human aliens because we can connect on an emotional level, so that's where we get Spock caught between the human and Vulcan cultures, all that angst. It's still not even remotely plausible that alien humanoids would evolve to look like us and be like us right down to interbreeding but there ya go. The only real story you can tell with true aliens is just how frickin' alien they are. The Borg are fairly alien. We can't relate to them on a cultural or personal level, we can only relate to them as competing lifeforms, the only common points are a desire for food, shelter, and procreation, and we'd still disagree about the relative definitions of those things. And true aliens would be even more alien than the Borg.
Supposing that we're talking about aliens coming to Earth, that excludes all the potential aliens who have no desire to go mucking about in the universe, we're talking aliens with some sort of curiosity, be it scientific, religious, or philosophical (or something else we cannot fathom) who want to go out and explore. Since they're paying attention to us, we're of interest on some level, but were we the point of the mission or just an interesting footnote? How do they perceive the world, how do they interpret it? One hypothetical alien I came up with was essentially a plant-like organism. It consisted of a mass of tendrils, like a mass of tentacles with no central body. These aliens constructed walking scaffolds so that they could move across the landscape. Their natural thought process is complex but moves at a far slower rate than ours so to them the world is a blur. Not normally a problem because they like taking their time to think things through. But in times of emergency, they need to react quickly, instinctively, so they grow an emergency brain that can react to danger. To their own perception, the world is spinning by and then suddenly they are somewhere else. They then review the memories of the emergency brain to see what has happened, the threat encountered and how their body reacted. These plants have the ability to finely control their own physiology and can actually adapt their genetic code on the fly. So while in terran species evolution takes place between generations, with these aliens there is no difference between generations. Genetic material is traded between individuals, new individuals can bud off at any time, and the only death comes from accident. Memories are encoded just like genetic material and can be traded so there is not quite a group mind but a universally shared experience. An individual could go off and have an adventure far away, come back with the unique experiences to share and everyone can now have the same memory of experiences as that individual.
So right there is an example of an alien we can imagine that humans cannot talk with, only correspond through a written medium. And even at that, the alien grasp of reality is so different from ours, common points of experience and metaphor become troublesome. And even allowing for that level of communication is a huge reach when thinking about truly alien aliens.
Damn, I remember that one. The part that really impressed me was they had the whole premise of "invisible boy" and that's what you're lead to expect due to low-plausibility kid books but the author then goes and gives a very plausible explanation for how a pseudo-invisibility suit would work, i.e. the dragonfly you remotely pilot.
Now just think back to that slashdot article a while back talking about a micro-UAV that could be powered by an external field and we're talking about Dune hunter-seekers.
On one hand, you've got the moonbats who see conspiracies everywhere and are all about what THEY don't what you to know THEY'RE doing, though they aren't quite sure who THEY are, but THEY are most certainly out to get us.
On the other hand, well, just look at all the shit we've been lied to about. Is it plausible that the cell phone industry went to market with products whose impacts weren't fully researched with consequences they themselves never dreamed of? Gee, let's see if we can think of another industry with a similar nasty surprise...oh, right, Big Tobacco. I seem to recall them insisting for years that there was no link between ciggies and cancer. I don't seem to recall too many consequences for these people lying to us, for obfuscating the debate with deliberately fabricated bullshit masquerading as science, and thus condemning more people to death.
The part that really pisses me off here is if there really is a cancer risk, you know damn well the cell companies will do their damnedest to cover it up and pretend there's nothing wrong, even while people continue to die. In fact, it would be utterly surprising if they did anything but this.
There's just no way to cheaply lift payload to orbit using our current rockets. That's why there's no revolutions in spacecraft-building.
We need something like space-plane, launch loops or space elevator for new space revolution.
Indeed. I always thought space elevators seemed so fantastic as to be beyond belief but damned if that might become practical before the seemingly less-challenging Buck Rogers rockets.
I always liked the idea for the old Orion drive ships. "We're not going to be building these things like dainty tinfoil creations, they'll be welded together in drydocks like navy destroyers and weigh about as much. Float 'em out to see, light off the a-bombs, they can handle the weight." Now I don't think even Dick Cheney could go along with the idea of a bomb-powered ship but I wonder if anti-matter would be a suitable replacement charge? Aside from the issue of not being able to manufacture it in any sort of significant quantity, I'm wondering how bad the gamma flashes would be. Would it be safe if we towed launch vehicles out in the middle of the ocean? How much ocean water would it take to block the rays? Would there be any ionizing radiation to produce fallout?
I've heard some other crazy ideas for non-chemical rockets. One design has pellets of deuterium dropped into a chamber where they are precisely hit by multiple lasers and causes a tiny fusion explosion that is forced out the bottom of the ship, giving a far better bang for the buck than conventional propellants.
It just seems like we're rehashing the way things were done before instead of coming up with something new. Is it that the technology is so bleedin' difficult to invent, is it a lack of money and political will, or would the danger of the technology be so great that there's no way in hell anyone would sign off on it? I mean, we could have built Orion in the 50's, we could crash-build one of those things in the event of some planetary emergency (i.e. needing to get Bruce Willis up to an asteroid to blow up), but nothing short of that would convince people to use nukes for go-juice.
Anyone else getting depressed with the space race? We've been at it for decades and the latest and greatest the Ruskies and Americans come up with looks like pretty much the same shit we've been doing for years, or in America's case, a 30 year wasted effort and then we come back to capsules. Repackaging the same old shit, up the price and call it a new version for the future, where have I seen this before? Oh, right, Microsoft. Apollo would be something along the lines of Win9x, better than what came before but not great. The shuttle would be like WinMil, we skipped XP and went straight to Vista with this Constellation debacle, and once that fails the next next shuttle successor will be something like Windows 7, a looming future failure.
"The first internet bubble popped largely because all business models failed except for ad selling." (from the article).
He's forgetting that there was also the speculative insanity that goes along with any bubble in any industry. There were many companies that made enough revenue to be possible if only the executive spending could have been reined in. I'm forgetting the name of it but there was a new media company that was doing something like $180 million in business but was spending $200 million. They produced content, text! It's not like that requires a huge capital investment. People are the biggest expense, get a cheap building somewhere, have your people work there, maybe rent a small bit of office space in a posh tower for impressing investors. But no, they put the whole organization in the posh tower, aeron chairs in every office, and shot their whole wad on overhead.
The internet has nothing to do with that kind of stupidity, it's endemic to human affairs. And the matter of crazy-stupid shit getting funded just because someone has a business plan? Again, common in any bubble, be it tech or tulips.
I heard a rattling in my dryer, opened it up and a quarter fell out. Does this mean I'll be doing a nickel upstate? I knew a guy doing a Susan B. Anthony for movie piracy.
Holographic TV, that's just what we need. So millions of geeks can watch Star Wars - and chuckle amusingly to themselves when they see a holograph of a holograph. Someone just shoot me now.
No, what I like is when they have commercials for TV's on your TV and say "Look at how much superior the picture on this new unit is compared to your old one." It's like "Hey, wait a second..."
This is why theaters need to stop pushing performance and start pushing features.
No, they need to start pushing sanitation.
Ok, my geek jones told me I had to go see Batman opening weekend. Well, the theater was jam-packed. The idiots beside me decided to bring their entire extended clan of rugrats who proceeded to talk through the entire movie. The bathroom floors were running with urine, the toilets brimming with feces. (I guess props should be made that number two's made it in, even if number one's did not.) And this is in a nice theater in a nice part of town. The general public consists of mouth-breathing animals incapable of the most simple courtesies, let alone hygiene practices. And it's not just us guys who are filthy pigs, the smell coming out of the women's room was enough to knock a buzzard off a shit cart.
I don't have a problem with paying for my movies but I'll be damned if I set foot in another theater again. And this is troubling because the new Bond is coming out soon and it promises to be as unsucky as the previous one. Telesyncs don't cut the mustard. Must discover a way to see the movie without having to wade into a diseased shitbox to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
if I wouldn't end up on a spamlist for every new tree-hugging wackjob cause that comes down the pike.
Because being against telco immunity means your a tree-hugger? WTF?
Who taps trees? Canadians and people from Vermont. Why do they tap trees? Maple syrup! Now could you imagine what would happen if they used wires in those taps? The syrup could get electolytes! And before you know it, Gatorade will have a maple-flavored sports drink.
So he's obviously either for or against maple-flavored Gatorade.
To pay for a rocket, it would have to be a very rare material. Like plutonium - of course, we already have rockets ready to deliver those in 90 minutes or less!
Or the next one's free?
The great irony of this, is that everyone on the board thinks that the studio can just arbitrarily make a good movie button.
"well, just make a good movie", betrays a total lack of understanding for the arts.
No one really knows a canned formula for making a good movie. A studio can do everything that it thinks will make a movie, best writers, best directors, best actors, and that doesn't guarantee a good picture at all. If you had 100 guys in a room, each of which with their own ideas, how do you know which of those is going to make a movie that will gross 300 million dollars? Clearly, if it was so easy to make a hit movie, then, don't you think they would do it. And, even if they did have a formula to make hit movies, half of the people on this board would be complaining that movies are formulaic.
You're missing the point. "Nobody ever sets out to make a bad movie," you say, and I say "Yeah, but they're not setting out to make great movies." It all comes down to project management. Does the project have the support of the money men? Do they put someone in charge of the project who will eat, sleep and breathe it? Will they trust in his judgment and limit external interference? Was the project even a good idea from the start?
Often times these movies can be seen as flawed undertakings right from the start but politics and egotism will prevent anyone from pointing that out. Are you going to be the one to tell Hitler invading Russia in the winter is a bad idea? May as well tell your girlfriend it's not the pants but her ass that makes her ass look fat. Some fool decided to give Transformers a greenlight. Are you going to be an even bigger fool and tell them it was a bad idea?
Some of the best and worst movies ever made have been driven by visionary men given almost dictatorial powers over the project. The Matrix as a triumph of tight focus and vision. Of course, the sequels show how directors can drive it into the ground. Lucas served as a catalyst for developing Star Wars, the give and take of the process making for a stronger product. He got too much control in the prequels and drove 'em into the ground. The LOTR trilogy is a triumph of this theory. Jackson had the drive, he gathered a brilliant team, and he achieved a miracle. That he then went on immediately after to pinch off a giant monkey turd of a Kong remake shows the theory is now flawless.
As good as those movies can be and as bad as they can be, I've yet to see a movie produced by a committee that did any better than middling. Often times such movies would compete with the very worst results of the bigshot directors.
Ultimately, I think the reason why we see design by committee and timid, uninspired leadership here is that we're looking at the "sons of great men" problem. When we talk of great men, the sons are rarely the equal of the fathers. If a king is good, his son is likely to be poor at best, more likely catastrophic. Founders can bring a business from nothing to world-leader in a single lifetime but when they and their fellows grow old and retire, the company can end up in the hands of bureaucrats who enjoy the profits of the business but lack an understanding of how it truly operates, of where they should be going. The very act of starting a business is a tremendous gamble, most fail. But now that the business is established, the management wants safe, predictable returns. (On the other hand, hired-gun CEO's will come in and gut the place, spike the stock, and cash out -- they don't care about the company's longevity.)
The final point to bring up is that art is the last thing on the minds of the money people running the show. The purpose of running a TV network is advertising. TV shows are nothing more than a means of keeping you glued to the seat during commercial breaks. Execs could give a fuck less about what it is that keeps you there during the breaks, they just want to make sure it's effective. You want police procedurals? Sitcoms? Oh, reality shows are doing great, Am
Redneck is derogatory in the same way that towelhead is. Neither being racist. Both being prejudiced.
I don't know of any popular arab female singers warbling "I'm a towelhead woman!"
The nice thing about robomissions is that they are so much cheaper than manned missions and there are no widows when things do wrong.
And yet all it would take is for a human to crumble the soil in his hand.
robotic-monotone ***Bzzzt***... Alas, I, POLAREXPLORER, for all the power of my mighty hydraulic crushing claw, cannot duplicate the qualities of a human hand. ***Bzzzraaat*** Next you will tell me cold logic circuits cannot match the sublime qualities of the human heart. ***gzzzzrp*** Tell me of this thing you fleshlings call love.
"Hey, which cola did you like more, A or B?"
"I liked A. Was it Coke?"
"Both were Coke."
"So, what's making them different?"
"I dipped my balls in sample A."
"What?"
"I dipped my balls in it. You like the taste of my balls."
Windows Vista, we dipped our balls in it.
How many of those are automatically generated rank-spoofers, 80%?
My favorite spoof pages were the ones that randomly substituted search terms into porno stories.
"Yes!" she screamed as he thrust his SAMSUNG CD PLAYER deep into her. "I want you balls-deep in my CHEAP HARD DRIVES!" The smell of DISCOUNT SOFTWARE filled the room.
I don't think cartoon network needs full bandwith just so it can show powerpuff girls in full 1080p
I disagree.
Could you please move on to Erin Esurence? Not only are the Powerpuffs underage, they don't even have digits. That's just wrong. Not that Esurence is right, it's just less wrong.
I am not a Lawyer (And I refuse to say IANAL - it took me 3 months to figure out what that meant)
I always figured it was like Craigslist personals...
Q: How do you make a man into a god? (Score:3, Insightful)
A: You kill him.
Damn, I was gonna pick "dip him in molten gold, put on pedestal."
Back in the good old days people who leaked a big conspiracy disappeared. Ever since the first Kennedy assassination, the Powers That Be have discovered that the best way to deal with leaks is to just have more and more leaks and bury the truth in a million similar sounding lies.
Suppose Mitchell's right and there really is a big alien contact conspiracy that's being covered up? We've all seen so many photos of streetlights coming from crazy/misguided people that the best policy from the conspiracy's point of view would be to let him yammer on and throw out a lot of phony alien contact crap. They don't have to discredit him, we'd all do that for them.
It goes a lot further than that. Set aside any talk of tinfoil conspiracy stuff, let's just talk about stuff that's been widely confirmed in newspapers around the world. Do Americans care? Nope! The Soviet approach is to crush anything the State disagrees with, make it forbidden, tempting, the sort of thing dissident minds would seek out. The American approach allows all sorts of information to be published but keeps the the poor too overworked to think, the middle-class to entertained to care, and the ruling class is perfectly happy exactly the way things are.
And this is the nexus of tinfoil hattery and apathy -- someone comes out speaking the truth and people are either dismiss the guy as a nut or are too apathetic to care.
I don't buy the "space alien" story for the simple reason that the "Area 51" aliens look too much like us. Bipedal, five fingers, five toes, two eyes, one two holed nose, one mouth. Look at the diversity of life on earth, with hooved animals, pipedaal animals with feathers, squids, six legged insects and eight legged spiders, no legged snakes. And all of these creatures presumably evolved from the first earthly protolife, as we've never seen life sponaneously appear since, nor have we been able to cause it to spontaneously appear.
They're humans from the future, what we evolved into, coming back to the past in order to reshape it. That's always been my favorite explanation, it means Skynet didn't win.
But step back from that philosophical stuff, and imagine that why would there be another species similar humans? I think people think aliens, they think human with different features with similar concepts of life, death, morals, social "revealing" ( would they even understand what that is? ) rather then something so foreign, we couldn't even begin to understand it, nor its motivations, if it has those?
Sci fi is fun because we graft human behavior on something different, and its fun for us to say ooh look they are just like us. But in the end it is just the human ego projection our emotions on something else.
The other reason for this is because it is astonishingly hard to tell a good story with alien characters who have no common ground with humans. We tell human-centric stories with human aliens because we can connect on an emotional level, so that's where we get Spock caught between the human and Vulcan cultures, all that angst. It's still not even remotely plausible that alien humanoids would evolve to look like us and be like us right down to interbreeding but there ya go. The only real story you can tell with true aliens is just how frickin' alien they are. The Borg are fairly alien. We can't relate to them on a cultural or personal level, we can only relate to them as competing lifeforms, the only common points are a desire for food, shelter, and procreation, and we'd still disagree about the relative definitions of those things. And true aliens would be even more alien than the Borg.
Supposing that we're talking about aliens coming to Earth, that excludes all the potential aliens who have no desire to go mucking about in the universe, we're talking aliens with some sort of curiosity, be it scientific, religious, or philosophical (or something else we cannot fathom) who want to go out and explore. Since they're paying attention to us, we're of interest on some level, but were we the point of the mission or just an interesting footnote? How do they perceive the world, how do they interpret it? One hypothetical alien I came up with was essentially a plant-like organism. It consisted of a mass of tendrils, like a mass of tentacles with no central body. These aliens constructed walking scaffolds so that they could move across the landscape. Their natural thought process is complex but moves at a far slower rate than ours so to them the world is a blur. Not normally a problem because they like taking their time to think things through. But in times of emergency, they need to react quickly, instinctively, so they grow an emergency brain that can react to danger. To their own perception, the world is spinning by and then suddenly they are somewhere else. They then review the memories of the emergency brain to see what has happened, the threat encountered and how their body reacted. These plants have the ability to finely control their own physiology and can actually adapt their genetic code on the fly. So while in terran species evolution takes place between generations, with these aliens there is no difference between generations. Genetic material is traded between individuals, new individuals can bud off at any time, and the only death comes from accident. Memories are encoded just like genetic material and can be traded so there is not quite a group mind but a universally shared experience. An individual could go off and have an adventure far away, come back with the unique experiences to share and everyone can now have the same memory of experiences as that individual.
So right there is an example of an alien we can imagine that humans cannot talk with, only correspond through a written medium. And even at that, the alien grasp of reality is so different from ours, common points of experience and metaphor become troublesome. And even allowing for that level of communication is a huge reach when thinking about truly alien aliens.
3 minutes is not very useful. By the time you reach your destination and actually get some good images,
Some slashdotters may be quicker on the trigger than you.
Damn, I remember that one. The part that really impressed me was they had the whole premise of "invisible boy" and that's what you're lead to expect due to low-plausibility kid books but the author then goes and gives a very plausible explanation for how a pseudo-invisibility suit would work, i.e. the dragonfly you remotely pilot.
Now just think back to that slashdot article a while back talking about a micro-UAV that could be powered by an external field and we're talking about Dune hunter-seekers.
--
Who is John Galt?
A smeghead.
On one hand, you've got the moonbats who see conspiracies everywhere and are all about what THEY don't what you to know THEY'RE doing, though they aren't quite sure who THEY are, but THEY are most certainly out to get us.
On the other hand, well, just look at all the shit we've been lied to about. Is it plausible that the cell phone industry went to market with products whose impacts weren't fully researched with consequences they themselves never dreamed of? Gee, let's see if we can think of another industry with a similar nasty surprise...oh, right, Big Tobacco. I seem to recall them insisting for years that there was no link between ciggies and cancer. I don't seem to recall too many consequences for these people lying to us, for obfuscating the debate with deliberately fabricated bullshit masquerading as science, and thus condemning more people to death.
The part that really pisses me off here is if there really is a cancer risk, you know damn well the cell companies will do their damnedest to cover it up and pretend there's nothing wrong, even while people continue to die. In fact, it would be utterly surprising if they did anything but this.
Just sayin'.
The main problem is: chemical rockets suck.
There's just no way to cheaply lift payload to orbit using our current rockets. That's why there's no revolutions in spacecraft-building.
We need something like space-plane, launch loops or space elevator for new space revolution.
Indeed. I always thought space elevators seemed so fantastic as to be beyond belief but damned if that might become practical before the seemingly less-challenging Buck Rogers rockets.
I always liked the idea for the old Orion drive ships. "We're not going to be building these things like dainty tinfoil creations, they'll be welded together in drydocks like navy destroyers and weigh about as much. Float 'em out to see, light off the a-bombs, they can handle the weight." Now I don't think even Dick Cheney could go along with the idea of a bomb-powered ship but I wonder if anti-matter would be a suitable replacement charge? Aside from the issue of not being able to manufacture it in any sort of significant quantity, I'm wondering how bad the gamma flashes would be. Would it be safe if we towed launch vehicles out in the middle of the ocean? How much ocean water would it take to block the rays? Would there be any ionizing radiation to produce fallout?
I've heard some other crazy ideas for non-chemical rockets. One design has pellets of deuterium dropped into a chamber where they are precisely hit by multiple lasers and causes a tiny fusion explosion that is forced out the bottom of the ship, giving a far better bang for the buck than conventional propellants.
It just seems like we're rehashing the way things were done before instead of coming up with something new. Is it that the technology is so bleedin' difficult to invent, is it a lack of money and political will, or would the danger of the technology be so great that there's no way in hell anyone would sign off on it? I mean, we could have built Orion in the 50's, we could crash-build one of those things in the event of some planetary emergency (i.e. needing to get Bruce Willis up to an asteroid to blow up), but nothing short of that would convince people to use nukes for go-juice.
Looks like a goddamn iCapsule. Damn you, Jobs!
Anyone else getting depressed with the space race? We've been at it for decades and the latest and greatest the Ruskies and Americans come up with looks like pretty much the same shit we've been doing for years, or in America's case, a 30 year wasted effort and then we come back to capsules. Repackaging the same old shit, up the price and call it a new version for the future, where have I seen this before? Oh, right, Microsoft. Apollo would be something along the lines of Win9x, better than what came before but not great. The shuttle would be like WinMil, we skipped XP and went straight to Vista with this Constellation debacle, and once that fails the next next shuttle successor will be something like Windows 7, a looming future failure.
*sigh*
"The first internet bubble popped largely because all business models failed except for ad selling." (from the article).
He's forgetting that there was also the speculative insanity that goes along with any bubble in any industry. There were many companies that made enough revenue to be possible if only the executive spending could have been reined in. I'm forgetting the name of it but there was a new media company that was doing something like $180 million in business but was spending $200 million. They produced content, text! It's not like that requires a huge capital investment. People are the biggest expense, get a cheap building somewhere, have your people work there, maybe rent a small bit of office space in a posh tower for impressing investors. But no, they put the whole organization in the posh tower, aeron chairs in every office, and shot their whole wad on overhead.
The internet has nothing to do with that kind of stupidity, it's endemic to human affairs. And the matter of crazy-stupid shit getting funded just because someone has a business plan? Again, common in any bubble, be it tech or tulips.
Wow. Someone piss in your cheerios much today, guy?
I heard a rattling in my dryer, opened it up and a quarter fell out. Does this mean I'll be doing a nickel upstate? I knew a guy doing a Susan B. Anthony for movie piracy.
Holographic TV, that's just what we need. So millions of geeks can watch Star Wars - and chuckle amusingly to themselves when they see a holograph of a holograph. Someone just shoot me now.
No, what I like is when they have commercials for TV's on your TV and say "Look at how much superior the picture on this new unit is compared to your old one." It's like "Hey, wait a second..."
This is why theaters need to stop pushing performance and start pushing features.
No, they need to start pushing sanitation.
Ok, my geek jones told me I had to go see Batman opening weekend. Well, the theater was jam-packed. The idiots beside me decided to bring their entire extended clan of rugrats who proceeded to talk through the entire movie. The bathroom floors were running with urine, the toilets brimming with feces. (I guess props should be made that number two's made it in, even if number one's did not.) And this is in a nice theater in a nice part of town. The general public consists of mouth-breathing animals incapable of the most simple courtesies, let alone hygiene practices. And it's not just us guys who are filthy pigs, the smell coming out of the women's room was enough to knock a buzzard off a shit cart.
I don't have a problem with paying for my movies but I'll be damned if I set foot in another theater again. And this is troubling because the new Bond is coming out soon and it promises to be as unsucky as the previous one. Telesyncs don't cut the mustard. Must discover a way to see the movie without having to wade into a diseased shitbox to do so.