The original Civ V release was terrible. Sure, it had some nice tactical flavor to it (which the computer players are completely incompetent at BTW), but it loses a lot of the fun of Civ IV.
For example, there's a lot more restrictions in play - especially the penalties on placing more cities. They dropped the health mechanic of Civ IV for growing cities and population, but they replaced it with a bogus penalty to culture and research from additional cities. It just doesn't feel right. The tech tree is bogus and it's clear that they structured the tree as they did for game balance rather than any sense of realism. Even worse is the culture trees. They don't feel even remotely realistic.
Subsequent releases have helped balance that stuff out somewhat (Civ 5 does have a better religion system an the ideology conflict in the late game is nice) and add more to the mid and late games, but it still needs a lot of work. For example, in the latest variant of Civ 5 there are three different ways to trade.
The city state mechanic needs work too. A more realistic mechanic would be that the barbarians eventually settle down and form the city states (as they adopt the civilization ideas of the core civilizations). But that would mean a lot more city states than are presently in the game and a whole new mechanism for dealing with trade and city state alliances is required.
There is no prototype, because the technology isn't there yet.
To the contrary, it's there, it's just not scaled up to the level where it'd be break even. The whole point of ITER should be to do that in a cost-effective manner not to find a way to burn several tens of billions of dollars.
Also, ITER is in fact a large portion of the global fusion research budget. Almost no one is building or even designing serious experiments right now, as most effort is going into ITER.
Currently. It wasn't in the past, and it won't be after it ends. Just because ITER gets a bigger budget presently doesn't actually mean much. Research value isn't proportional to funding. Those other projects are about as useful as ITER for a fraction the cost such as the Polywell reactor, the National Ignition Laboratory, even some of the cold fusion stuff.
It's actually vastly, vastly, vastly underpriced and underfunded.
Where's the evidence? All I see are the usual white elephant projects.
Here's a picture that paints a thousand words that makes the laughable troll headline of "skyrocketing" cost for ITER make the idiot who wrote it seem like he has trouble tying his own shoes:
That picture is pulled out of someone's ass. Those curves have no meaning. The assumption is that if we magically spent that kind of money, we'd have viable fusion. I see no reason, given what actually happened and given the US's consistent fumbling with similar scale R&D to believe that. That black line is more than ample, if fusion researchers were at all serious about developing fusion power.
Also note the scale on the y axis, and remember that the annual cost of the air conditioning the troops in Afghanistan is $20 billion.
Remember that air conditioning money is at least doing something useful. My view on US fusion research is that it's been a great way to keep fusion researchers from doing anything useful. That's harm in my book.
It may not have been a lie. Sometimes people say things that turn out false. When they deliberately say falsehoods, then that's lying. And who knows, this might have actually happened and the guy is telling the truth.
ala TV and so-called news which is really just a literal media monopoly
Not even close. Though there is something of a monopsony with the US government providing news of US government activities and access to US government officials.
No you couldn't, demonstrably. If they could build an ITER-scale reactor for one-hundredth the price they would have.
Nobody is bothering is not the same thing as nobody can't. My experience has been that publicly funded R&D is vastly more expensive than it can be. And something like ITER doesn't contain costs even within an order of magnitude of a normal publicly funded R&D project.
There are nebulous plans to build DEMO and the later PROTO which will be power generating fusion reactors but they'll still be less than fully-commercial designs, just another step closer to the rollout of workable and cost-effective fusion power generation.
I believe these projects will never be in the ancestry of a practical commercial fusion power plant. The approach is too flawed by its nature to work. As I wrote here, the three flaws with this sort of research. The government project doesn't have to work. The government project adds features and such willy nilly. And there's less control of costs.
I suspect that's how every over-priced, over-budget research project is considered at the start.
No, there's always some Pollyanna type who thinks it can't possibly be done for less out there.
Then reality intrudes, and unforeseen circumstances (like bureaucratic meddling) cause the actual costs to increase.
Well, of course, you can always make the problem worse (three orders of magnitude is the next step up this particular ladder). But if you were trying to say that the cheaper approach isn't actually cheaper, then you picked a mighty peculiar way of trying.
Also, I actually have experience with a project that did something for less than a government funded project by at least three orders of magnitude. Lockheed Martin was paid $150 million to launch the HALE-D, an airship allegedly capable of reaching 60k feet, but which actually only reached 32k feet before it came down prematurely.
My non-profit group, JP Aerospace took a much simpler though far less capable airship to 95k feet - which is for now better than the current world record for airships at a cost well, more than three orders of magnitude less.
This demonstrates the typical differences between a government project and a private one. The government one doesn't have to work. The government project adds features and such willy nilly. And there's less control of costs.
These factors all play out with ITER. There's no blowback if ITER doesn't work or it is fundamentally broken due to misdesign. It's all a learning experience that was totally worth the tens of billions of dollars we put into it. LOL.
Similarly, it wasn't enough to make ITER a focused, break even prototype. We have to add the fig leaf of fusion research so that gobs of useless functionality could be indiscriminately tossed in to the project. The vast project that does everything is a huge failure mode of publicly funded research.
And of course, they have to use stuff that is beyond state of the art even though it wouldn't be used in any commercial fusion power plants. It has built in irrelevance to anything of value we might try over the next few decades. This is how you can take copious funding (yes, I know fusion power research is not as well funded as the fusion research community would like) and turn it into shit.
I suspect that's how every over-priced, over-budget research project is considered at the start.
Then reality intrudes, and unforeseen circumstances (like bureaucratic meddling) cause the actual costs to increase.
Well, of course, you can always make the problem worse (three orders of magnitude is the next step up this particular ladder). But if you were trying to say that the cheaper approach isn't actually cheaper, then you picked a mighty peculiar way of trying.
This is just heat, not electricity, there's no plans to try and extract energy from the system yet.
Ok, so no energy extracted from system for anything even remotely useful, even as a demonstration? That is break even.
It's an experimental platform, not a prototype power generating system.
Then it's vastly overpriced. The value is in it as a prototype. You could get the experimental platform for a couple of orders of magnitude less money. You might even be able to get that and the alleged prototype which can return ten times its power input for less than what is spent on ITER.
Whether ITER succeeds in this aim we won't know until it actually runs.
Except that we already know it is vastly overpriced for the things it is supposed to do. It is priced to fail.
Concluding it will not lead to a practical source of energy would be a huge scientific result, and worth the money.
How about that it won't lead to a practical source of energy because of the money? I could make a million dollar car with lots of expensive fancy stuff, but it would as a result be a terrible prototype for a ten thousand dollar car. In order to build an effective prototype, the costs have to be near the final product. Since the US is paying 9% of the cost, that means the overall cost of ITER is currently well over $40 billion and climbing (perhaps to around $65 billion, if the cost inflation continues to a share of $6 billion for the US).
In addition, what is the cost of the next generation of fusion research reactors going to be, given how they inflate in cost from generation to generation? It's not sane to consider $100 billion current dollar commercial fusion reactors unless their cost is a lot cheaper than $1 per watt.
Did you systematically disprove the theories used to underpin the construction of ITER, before you so vehemently claim that it won't pay off?
We can always see what they claim with ITER. Basically, that they're developing a hugely expensive test platform for fusion research which might be able to hit break even. That's not a pay off even if they hit their goals.
If you're going to dump a ton of money into a research project you need to learn some basic economics, like return on investment. I'm tired of people claiming that scientific research is the only human activity that never has to justify its existence. That's never been true, and we're better for R&D having to pay the bills.
And tangentially, how precisely does one "steal" from an open collaboration anyway?
Actually, Rambus is a good example. They secretly patented a lot of the tech being developed by JEDEC organization members (the open collaboration) and scored big.
OTOH, ITER isn't going to lead to any economically viable fusion technologies, so there isn't a serious danger of someone stealing valuable technology via secret patents.
Back in 2003, there was a similar system called the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) that was close to being implemented. It got deep-sixed by some world-class idiots from Congress (see my opinion then). It's too bad that we have to go to a somewhat contrived surveying/polling system rather than use something that we know works.
For example, I think a PAM system would have given us (and I mean everyone not just US policy makers) insight into how the events of the Arab Spring revolutions would evolve even if it couldn't have predicted the original flash point.
Whether it's Snowden blowing the whistle on the Feds or some engineer blowing the whistle on GM management, there is no protection for someone wanting to do the right thing. This is how Nazi Germany got to where they ended up.
Which is quite relevant actually. During the time of the Wiemar Republic, apparently in the 1920s, several would-be whistle blowers got murdered for knowing too much about violations of the Treaty of Versailles (for example, the secret development of military weapons, tanks, airplanes, naval ships, etc, and the creation of an illegal, shadow general staff for the military).
Those violations in turn were a significant and necessary part of the transformation of Germany into the powerful, totalitarian, military machine that killed so many people. It's not as bad now (else we wouldn't have heard of Snowden), but lack of protection for whistle blowers can have monumentally lethal results.
Create a scapegoat and deep six the visibility of the problem in the media. I don't buy at all that this problem can be narrowed down to two misbehaving engineers especially given what appears to be collusion on the regulatory government side (perhaps over both Obama and G. W. Bush's terms) to ignore the problem.
So you believe, then, that when you die, it's to the worms and that's that? No afterlife? Do you believe you have a soul? Are you your body or are you in your body?
It's not a matter of what I believe since mere belief doesn't shape reality to this degree. I simply have no basis for believing or not believing in those things and I can't simply make them go the way I want by wanting. If I have a soul or if there is an afterlife is something I can deal with as such time as it becomes relevant.
Take a minute and think about these things...
I could think about them till the heat death of the universe and I wouldn't come any closer to having answers.
And in the eyes of the Constitution, your speech is as good as theirs. Again, I'm glad that it is so.
The Constitution doesn't constrain my opinions nor anyone else's, making it quite irrelevant to the discussion. And as for my opinions on the present subject, I've given adequate reason for them.
It's something like claiming that certain unsafe actions are just the same in the eye of the law as the same action taken with precaution, hence they are equivalent. The problem is that those actions have different consequences no matter what the law. Whining without fixing a problem is just as legal as fixing the problem without whining. But they have different outcomes.
Well, I guess the point of the story is that a righteous man is not a perfect man, a man with trivial moral choices, or a man who never experiences anything bad.
Knowing that I will one day stand before God to answer for how well I lived out my faith is a fearful thing
You don't know that. The human brain plays funny tricks on us on occasion and this false certainty is one of those tricks.
The rational mind would ask "Why have faith in this particular thing?" God obviously doesn't need us to have faith in him whether or not he exists. We don't need to have faith in God either. When we do want or need faith, just about anything constructive works.
The only thing that needs that faith is the belief itself. In order for a belief to persist, someone needs to believe the belief.
Slashdot Mirror
So the answer to the grandparent's question is "Yes, I do fly off the handle much."
The original Civ V release was terrible. Sure, it had some nice tactical flavor to it (which the computer players are completely incompetent at BTW), but it loses a lot of the fun of Civ IV.
For example, there's a lot more restrictions in play - especially the penalties on placing more cities. They dropped the health mechanic of Civ IV for growing cities and population, but they replaced it with a bogus penalty to culture and research from additional cities. It just doesn't feel right. The tech tree is bogus and it's clear that they structured the tree as they did for game balance rather than any sense of realism. Even worse is the culture trees. They don't feel even remotely realistic.
Subsequent releases have helped balance that stuff out somewhat (Civ 5 does have a better religion system an the ideology conflict in the late game is nice) and add more to the mid and late games, but it still needs a lot of work. For example, in the latest variant of Civ 5 there are three different ways to trade.
The city state mechanic needs work too. A more realistic mechanic would be that the barbarians eventually settle down and form the city states (as they adopt the civilization ideas of the core civilizations). But that would mean a lot more city states than are presently in the game and a whole new mechanism for dealing with trade and city state alliances is required.
There is no prototype, because the technology isn't there yet.
To the contrary, it's there, it's just not scaled up to the level where it'd be break even. The whole point of ITER should be to do that in a cost-effective manner not to find a way to burn several tens of billions of dollars.
Also, ITER is in fact a large portion of the global fusion research budget. Almost no one is building or even designing serious experiments right now, as most effort is going into ITER.
Currently. It wasn't in the past, and it won't be after it ends. Just because ITER gets a bigger budget presently doesn't actually mean much. Research value isn't proportional to funding. Those other projects are about as useful as ITER for a fraction the cost such as the Polywell reactor, the National Ignition Laboratory, even some of the cold fusion stuff.
It's actually vastly, vastly, vastly underpriced and underfunded.
Where's the evidence? All I see are the usual white elephant projects.
Here's a picture that paints a thousand words that makes the laughable troll headline of "skyrocketing" cost for ITER make the idiot who wrote it seem like he has trouble tying his own shoes:
That picture is pulled out of someone's ass. Those curves have no meaning. The assumption is that if we magically spent that kind of money, we'd have viable fusion. I see no reason, given what actually happened and given the US's consistent fumbling with similar scale R&D to believe that. That black line is more than ample, if fusion researchers were at all serious about developing fusion power.
Also note the scale on the y axis, and remember that the annual cost of the air conditioning the troops in Afghanistan is $20 billion.
Remember that air conditioning money is at least doing something useful. My view on US fusion research is that it's been a great way to keep fusion researchers from doing anything useful. That's harm in my book.
It may not have been a lie. Sometimes people say things that turn out false. When they deliberately say falsehoods, then that's lying. And who knows, this might have actually happened and the guy is telling the truth.
ala TV and so-called news which is really just a literal media monopoly
Not even close. Though there is something of a monopsony with the US government providing news of US government activities and access to US government officials.
We already have that. We just call them "librarians".
No you couldn't, demonstrably. If they could build an ITER-scale reactor for one-hundredth the price they would have.
Nobody is bothering is not the same thing as nobody can't. My experience has been that publicly funded R&D is vastly more expensive than it can be. And something like ITER doesn't contain costs even within an order of magnitude of a normal publicly funded R&D project.
There are nebulous plans to build DEMO and the later PROTO which will be power generating fusion reactors but they'll still be less than fully-commercial designs, just another step closer to the rollout of workable and cost-effective fusion power generation.
I believe these projects will never be in the ancestry of a practical commercial fusion power plant. The approach is too flawed by its nature to work. As I wrote here, the three flaws with this sort of research. The government project doesn't have to work. The government project adds features and such willy nilly. And there's less control of costs.
I suspect that's how every over-priced, over-budget research project is considered at the start.
No, there's always some Pollyanna type who thinks it can't possibly be done for less out there.
Then reality intrudes, and unforeseen circumstances (like bureaucratic meddling) cause the actual costs to increase.
Well, of course, you can always make the problem worse (three orders of magnitude is the next step up this particular ladder). But if you were trying to say that the cheaper approach isn't actually cheaper, then you picked a mighty peculiar way of trying.
Also, I actually have experience with a project that did something for less than a government funded project by at least three orders of magnitude. Lockheed Martin was paid $150 million to launch the HALE-D, an airship allegedly capable of reaching 60k feet, but which actually only reached 32k feet before it came down prematurely.
My non-profit group, JP Aerospace took a much simpler though far less capable airship to 95k feet - which is for now better than the current world record for airships at a cost well, more than three orders of magnitude less.
This demonstrates the typical differences between a government project and a private one. The government one doesn't have to work. The government project adds features and such willy nilly. And there's less control of costs.
These factors all play out with ITER. There's no blowback if ITER doesn't work or it is fundamentally broken due to misdesign. It's all a learning experience that was totally worth the tens of billions of dollars we put into it. LOL.
Similarly, it wasn't enough to make ITER a focused, break even prototype. We have to add the fig leaf of fusion research so that gobs of useless functionality could be indiscriminately tossed in to the project. The vast project that does everything is a huge failure mode of publicly funded research.
And of course, they have to use stuff that is beyond state of the art even though it wouldn't be used in any commercial fusion power plants. It has built in irrelevance to anything of value we might try over the next few decades. This is how you can take copious funding (yes, I know fusion power research is not as well funded as the fusion research community would like) and turn it into shit.
I suspect that's how every over-priced, over-budget research project is considered at the start.
Then reality intrudes, and unforeseen circumstances (like bureaucratic meddling) cause the actual costs to increase.
Well, of course, you can always make the problem worse (three orders of magnitude is the next step up this particular ladder). But if you were trying to say that the cheaper approach isn't actually cheaper, then you picked a mighty peculiar way of trying.
This is just heat, not electricity, there's no plans to try and extract energy from the system yet.
Ok, so no energy extracted from system for anything even remotely useful, even as a demonstration? That is break even.
It's an experimental platform, not a prototype power generating system.
Then it's vastly overpriced. The value is in it as a prototype. You could get the experimental platform for a couple of orders of magnitude less money. You might even be able to get that and the alleged prototype which can return ten times its power input for less than what is spent on ITER.
Whether ITER succeeds in this aim we won't know until it actually runs.
Except that we already know it is vastly overpriced for the things it is supposed to do. It is priced to fail.
You're compring the drive-away cost of a car to the entire R&D program here.
No, I'm comparing the cost of a car to a single prototype (which is what I said). The entire cost of fusion R&D is much greater than the cost of ITER.
I wonder what the reward was...
Pretty damn high. Enron went bankrupt anyway.
There is a $250k reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in this property damage case.
Well, that's because PG&E cares. Who cares that people get shot at on the highway?
Concluding it will not lead to a practical source of energy would be a huge scientific result, and worth the money.
How about that it won't lead to a practical source of energy because of the money? I could make a million dollar car with lots of expensive fancy stuff, but it would as a result be a terrible prototype for a ten thousand dollar car. In order to build an effective prototype, the costs have to be near the final product. Since the US is paying 9% of the cost, that means the overall cost of ITER is currently well over $40 billion and climbing (perhaps to around $65 billion, if the cost inflation continues to a share of $6 billion for the US).
In addition, what is the cost of the next generation of fusion research reactors going to be, given how they inflate in cost from generation to generation? It's not sane to consider $100 billion current dollar commercial fusion reactors unless their cost is a lot cheaper than $1 per watt.
Did you systematically disprove the theories used to underpin the construction of ITER, before you so vehemently claim that it won't pay off?
We can always see what they claim with ITER. Basically, that they're developing a hugely expensive test platform for fusion research which might be able to hit break even. That's not a pay off even if they hit their goals.
If you're going to dump a ton of money into a research project you need to learn some basic economics, like return on investment. I'm tired of people claiming that scientific research is the only human activity that never has to justify its existence. That's never been true, and we're better for R&D having to pay the bills.
And tangentially, how precisely does one "steal" from an open collaboration anyway?
Actually, Rambus is a good example. They secretly patented a lot of the tech being developed by JEDEC organization members (the open collaboration) and scored big.
OTOH, ITER isn't going to lead to any economically viable fusion technologies, so there isn't a serious danger of someone stealing valuable technology via secret patents.
Your message about whistle blowing is lost on me, all I gather from your comment is we should have done a better job spying on Germany.
Who's "we"? A lot of German citizens died as a result of not knowing the secret policies of their own government.
Back in 2003, there was a similar system called the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) that was close to being implemented. It got deep-sixed by some world-class idiots from Congress (see my opinion then). It's too bad that we have to go to a somewhat contrived surveying/polling system rather than use something that we know works.
For example, I think a PAM system would have given us (and I mean everyone not just US policy makers) insight into how the events of the Arab Spring revolutions would evolve even if it couldn't have predicted the original flash point.
Whether it's Snowden blowing the whistle on the Feds or some engineer blowing the whistle on GM management, there is no protection for someone wanting to do the right thing. This is how Nazi Germany got to where they ended up.
Which is quite relevant actually. During the time of the Wiemar Republic, apparently in the 1920s, several would-be whistle blowers got murdered for knowing too much about violations of the Treaty of Versailles (for example, the secret development of military weapons, tanks, airplanes, naval ships, etc, and the creation of an illegal, shadow general staff for the military).
Those violations in turn were a significant and necessary part of the transformation of Germany into the powerful, totalitarian, military machine that killed so many people. It's not as bad now (else we wouldn't have heard of Snowden), but lack of protection for whistle blowers can have monumentally lethal results.
What is the goal GM is trying to achieve here.
Create a scapegoat and deep six the visibility of the problem in the media. I don't buy at all that this problem can be narrowed down to two misbehaving engineers especially given what appears to be collusion on the regulatory government side (perhaps over both Obama and G. W. Bush's terms) to ignore the problem.
So you believe, then, that when you die, it's to the worms and that's that? No afterlife? Do you believe you have a soul? Are you your body or are you in your body?
It's not a matter of what I believe since mere belief doesn't shape reality to this degree. I simply have no basis for believing or not believing in those things and I can't simply make them go the way I want by wanting. If I have a soul or if there is an afterlife is something I can deal with as such time as it becomes relevant.
Take a minute and think about these things...
I could think about them till the heat death of the universe and I wouldn't come any closer to having answers.
So my answer is this. Remember the Serenity Prayer.
And in the eyes of the Constitution, your speech is as good as theirs. Again, I'm glad that it is so.
The Constitution doesn't constrain my opinions nor anyone else's, making it quite irrelevant to the discussion. And as for my opinions on the present subject, I've given adequate reason for them.
It's something like claiming that certain unsafe actions are just the same in the eye of the law as the same action taken with precaution, hence they are equivalent. The problem is that those actions have different consequences no matter what the law. Whining without fixing a problem is just as legal as fixing the problem without whining. But they have different outcomes.
Well, I guess the point of the story is that a righteous man is not a perfect man, a man with trivial moral choices, or a man who never experiences anything bad.
Knowing that I will one day stand before God to answer for how well I lived out my faith is a fearful thing
You don't know that. The human brain plays funny tricks on us on occasion and this false certainty is one of those tricks.
The rational mind would ask "Why have faith in this particular thing?" God obviously doesn't need us to have faith in him whether or not he exists. We don't need to have faith in God either. When we do want or need faith, just about anything constructive works.
The only thing that needs that faith is the belief itself. In order for a belief to persist, someone needs to believe the belief.